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COPYRIGHT DEPOSrT. 



THE PROBLEMS OF 
PHILOSOPHY 

BY 
HARALD HOFFDING 

TRANSLATED BY 

GALEN M. FISHER 

WITH A PREFACE BY 

WILLIAM JAMES 



Wefo gtorfc 
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., Ltd. 
1905 

All rights reserved 



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OOP? s> 



■ ■£ 






Copyright, 1905, 
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. 



Set up and electrotyped. Published October, 1905. 



Norfaoatr $ress 

J. S. Cashing & Co. — Berwick & Smith Co. 

Norwood, Mass., U.S.A. 






PREFACE 

Professor Hoffding of Copenhagen is 
one of the wisest, as well as one of the most 
learned of living philosophers. His " Psy- 
chology," his " Ethics," and his "History 
of Modern Philosophy" have made his 
name known and respected among English 
readers, though his admirable "Philosophy 
of Religion" still calls for a translator. 
The following little work is, so to speak, 
his philosophical testament. In it he sums 
up in an extraordinarily compact and pithy 
form the result of his lifelong reflections 
on the deepest alternatives of philosophical 
opinion. The work, to my mind, is so 
pregnant and its conclusions so sensible — 
or at least so in accordance with what I 
regard as sensible — that I have had it 
translated as a contribution to the educa- 
tion of our English- reading students. 



vi Preface 

Rationalism in philosophy proceeds from 
the whole to its parts, and maintains that 
the connection between facts must at bottom 
be intimate and not external: the universe 
is a Unit, and the parts of Being must be 
interlocked continuously. Empiricism, on 
the other hand, goes from parts to whole, 
and is willing to allow that in the end some 
parts may be merely added to others, and 
that what the word 'and' stands for may 
be a part of real Being as well as of speech. 
For radical rationalism, Reality in itself is 
eternally complete, and the confusions of 
experience are our illusion. For radical 
empiricism, confusion may be a category 
of the Real itself, and "ever not quite" a 
permanent result of our attempts at think- 
ing it out straighter. Professors of Phi- 
losophy are almost always rationalists ; and 
the student, passing from the street into 
their lecture- rooms, usually finds a world 
presented to him, so abstract, pure, and 
logical, and perfect, that it is hard for 
him to see in it any resemblance of char- 



Preface vii 

acter to the struggling and disjointed sum 
of muddy facts which he has left behind 
him, outside. 

Now the peculiarity of Professor HofT- 
ding is that whereas he has the manner 
of a rationalistic professor of Philosophy, 
being as abstract and technical in his style 
of exposition as any one can wish, his 
results, nevertheless, keep in touch with 
the temperament of concrete reality, and 
he allows that 'ever not quite' may be the 
last word of our attempts at understand- 
ing life rationally. 

The word 'rationally' here denotes cer- 
tain definite connections which Professor 
Hoffding also sums up under the name of 
'continuities.' He opposes to them the 
notion of the 'irrational,' as that residuum 
of crude or 'alogicaP fact, 'mere* fact, 
that may remain over when our attempts 
to establish logical continuity among things 
have reached their limit. The conjunction 
' and ' would be the only bond here between 
the continuous and the irrational portion 



viii Preface 

of Reality. Professor Hoffding is in short 
an empiricist and pluralist, although he 
prefers to call himself a 'critical Monist.' 
He means by the word 'critical,' here, to 
indicate that the continuity and unity of 
Reality are at no time complete, but may 
be yet in process of completion. Our 
thought, which is itself a part of Reality, is 
surely incomplete; but in endeavoring to 
make itself ever more continuous and to 
see the world as ever more rational, it works 
in the direction of more continuity; and 
the whole of Creation may analogously be 
in travail to get itself into an ever more 
continuous and rational form. 

Empiricist matter presented in a ration- 
alist's manner — this to my mind gives 
their distinction to the pages that follow. 
They form a multum in parvo so well cal- 
culated to impress and influence the usual 
rationalistic- minded student of philosophy, 
that I put them forth in English for his 
benefit. 

It takes, I confess, sdme little knowledge 



Preface ix 

of philosophic literature to appreciate the 
far-reaching significance of some of our 
author's paragraphs, and to distribute em- 
phasis properly among them. They are 
too brief and abstract for the unguided 
beginner. For his benefit let me barely 
indicate some of the book's positions which 
seem to me particularly noteworthy. 

I have spoken of the notion that since 
the world is incomplete anyhow, so far as 
our thought goes, it may also in other ways 
be only approaching perfection. Perfec- 
tion, in other words, may not be eternal; 
rather are things working toward it as 
an ideal; and God himself may be one 
of the co-workers. Time, on this view, 
must be real, and cannot, Professor Hoff- 
ding says, be banished, as ultra-rationalists 
pretend, from absolute reality. 

With this general position goes what our 
author calls the ' dynamic ' notion of Truth, 
as opposed to the 'static' notion. I should 
interpret this as equivalent to saying that 
'knowledge' is a relation of our thinking 



x Preface 

activities to reality, and that those activi- 
ties are ' truest ' which work best — the 
term 'work' being taken in the widest 
possible number of senses. Thought is 
thus an instrument of adaptation to, and 
eventually of modification of, its objects. 
Its duty may, but need not always, be 
merely to copy the latter. In all this, 
Professor Hoffding aligns himself with the 
'economical' school of scientific logicians, 
and (if I mistake not) with the recent 
'humanistic' and ' pragmatistic ' literature 
of our own language. 

Professor Hoffding's 'critical' (as op- 
posed to absolute) Monism means that 
although you cannot exhaustively account 
for any item of fact by referring to the whole 
of which it is a member, yet so much of 
what we call a fact consists of its relations 
to other facts, that we are equally unable 
to see any fact as wholly independent. 
The part in itself remains for us an ab- 
straction, and from a whole which itself is 
for us a mere ideal. Neither is given in 



Preface xi 

experience, nor can either be adequately 
supplied by our reason; so that, both 
above and below, thought fails to con- 
tinue, and terminates against an 'irra- 
tional.' This in the end may mean that 
Being is really incomplete, in any sense in 
which our logic apprehends completeness. 

No one better than Professor Hoffding 
in these pages has shown how all our at- 
tempted definitions of the Whole of things, 
are made by conceiving it as analogous in 
constitution to some one of its parts which 
we treat as a type-phenomenon. No one 
has traced better the logical limitations of 
this sort of speculation. We never can 
absolutely prove its validity. We can only 
paint our more or less plausible pictures; 
and philosophy thus must always be some- 
thing of an art as well as of a science. 

The fundamental type- phenomenon is 
the fact that we can, to some degree at any 
rate, make things mentally intelligible. Be- 
ing and our mental forms are thus not 
incongruent. And as our mental forms 



xii Preface 

act in us as unifying forces, so we must 
suppose that the energy in Being that 
tends toward unity in the thought-part oj 
Being, tends, by analogy, toward unity else- 
where also. This puts Professor Hoffding 
in a general attitude of harmony with ideal- 
istic ways of thinking. But he still insists 
that Being can never be expressed in thought 
without some blind remainder. 

In Ethics the same antinomy or conflict 
between part and whole occurs which we 
find in the other problems. The single act 
or agent must have independent value, yet 
must also be a means toward farther 
values. Neither from any whole or any 
parts concretely given can we deduce a 
continuous ethical system. Such a system 
is still a vacant abstraction; and both in 
Being and in concrete thinking the kingdom 
of goods must be regarded as still engaged 
in the making. 

Our author's conception of religion is 
one of his best strokes, in my opinion. He 
defines it as a belief in the ultimate 'con- 



Preface xiii 

servation of values,' or rather of what has 
value. This seems to me to cover more 
facts in the concrete history of human 
religions than any definition with which I 
am acquainted. Yet one easily sees how 
experience may change our ideas of what 
the most genuinely ideal values are; so the 
* philosophy' of religion, less than any other 
philosophy perhaps, is entitled to become 
dogmatic. The belief in the conservation 
of values has itself a value, for it can give 
an energy to life. Being so vital a function, 
it will always be sure to find some form for 
itself functionally equivalent to the religions 
of the past, whether that form be called by 
the name of religion, or be called by some 
other name. 

An unfinished world then, with all Crea- 
tion, along with our thought, struggling into 
more continuous and better shape — such 
is our author's general view of the matter 
of Philosophy. I have doubtless empha- 
sized the points that appealed most to my 
own personal interests. Others — and there 



xiv Preface 

are many which are fundamental — I must 
leave the reader to find out. I need only 
add that I have carefully revised the trans- 
lation, and that (though it may not be 
elegant) it is, I believe, faithful to the 
author's meaning throughout. 

WILLIAM JAMES. 
Harvard University. 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Introduction i 

CHAPTER I 

The Problem of Consciousness 

i. The concept of personality and analytic psy- 
chology .11 

2. Discontinuity in the psychical sphere . . 25 

3. Psychology and physiology .... 46 

4. Will and energy ...... 54 

CHAPTER II 

The Problem of Knowledge 



1. The kinds of knowledge . 

2. The principles of knowledge , 

3. Quality and quantity 

4. Causality, elementary and ideal 

5. Subject and object . 



60 
67 
85 
95 
107 



CHAPTER III 
The Problem of Being 

1. Problem and method 1 16 

2. Metaphysic as an art 126 /' 

3. First type-phenomenon (unity or plurality?) . 130 

4. Second type-phenomenon (spirit or matter?) . 138 

5. Third type-phenomenon (rest or development?) 144 

xv 



xvi Contents 

CHAPTER IV 
The Problem of Values 

PAGE 

I. Introduction .153 



A. The Ethical Problem 



158 
158 
165 
165 
171 



(a) Ethical work .... 

2. The principle of continuity in ethics 

(b) The rationality of ethical valuations 

3. The conflict of ideal values 

4. The diversity of individual conditions 

B. The Religious Problem 

5. The principle of continuity in the philosophy of 

religion 173 

6. The psychological position of religion . .176 

7. Historical forms of religion . . . .181 

Notes . . 187 



THE PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 




PHILOSOPHICAL 
PROBLEMS 

INTRODUCTION 

'HILOSOPHICAL ideas, as the 
history of philosophy shows, 
may have a double significance. 
They may attempt to pro- 
pound, to discuss, or to solve certain prob- 
lems; and they may represent symptoms 
of certain tendencies of the intellectual life 
of man. Between these two phases of 
philosophy a constant interaction takes 
place; for the fact that a problem is 
propounded and treated in a certain way, 
may be considered as a symptom of a 
peculiar intellectual movement ; and, on the 
other hand, the sting of problems excites 
intellectual movements which otherwise 
would not arise. In this interaction we 



2 Philosophical Problems 

discover an intimate connection between 
personal life and scientific inquiry. This 
connection prevails to a greater or less 
degree in all branches of science; but from 
the nature of the case it is brought out 
especially as we approach the border-lines 
of human knowledge. It appear* more 
clearly in mental than in natural science, 
and most clearly in philosophy, whose 
problems are essentially border-problems. 

There is a current opinion that personal- 
ity and scientific research are antagonistic. 
Hence, on the one hand, the student would 
fain doff his personality when he thinks 
scientifically; and, on the other, he lives as 
if scientific methods and results had no 
significance for the freer side of his per- 
sonal development. I myself, in my youth, 
swore allegiance to such a view, under the 
overpowering influence of S. Kierkegaard. 
If I have finally broken its hold on me, I 
venture to say that that is because I have 
become better acquainted with both science 
and the personal life. 



Introduction 3 

The desire to investigate things is a special 
form of the striving after consistency with 
one's self under all one's manifold and chang- 
ing experiences. This effort manifests it- 
self in formal as well as in real science, — 
in the impulse to form series of concepts 
in which one member develops itself by 
inner necessity out of the preceding, as 
well as in the effort to combine our actual 
experiences into the closest and richest forms 
of continuity. Personality consists pre- 
eminently in the inner unity and connection 
of all our ideas, feelings, and strivings. It 
does not abdicate its life when it devotes 
itself to research. It begets, on the contrary, 
in science, as in art, an objective image of 
itself. Only thus can we understand the 
inner character which the passion for 
knowledge assumes, that amor intellectualis 
felt by the seeker as he works up to the 
pinnacle from which the particulars dis- 
close themselves as parts of one great 
whole. That holy fire, which, in spite of 
all smothering and repression ever anew 



4 Philosophical Problems 

sets thought ablaze, finds in this its only 
explanation. 

But personality in turn needs refining by 
the scientific process, since it must bend to 
the objective connections of thought, the 
fixed order of things within which every 
individual being has its appointed place. 
Freedom is won through hard obedience to 
the truth. It is the noble prerogative of 
personality that it can discover the great 
laws that condition its own conservation, 
that rightly determine its desires, and fix the 
conditions for their realization. There is a 
science of the personal life as of everything 
else; like all other sciences it is, no doubt, 
incomplete, but in every earnest investiga- 
tion into the form and demands of the per- 
sonal life, it is presupposed. Among present 
day philosophers, Charles Renouvier lays the 
greatest stress on the antithesis between the 
demands of thought and personality. 1 Yet 
even he calls for a rational conception of 
personality, and cannot reject all the analo- 
gies between the two. 



Introduction 5 

Such an analogy is thrown into clear re- 
lief when one tries to formulate the chief 
problems with which philosophical in- 
quiry is concerned. These problems arise 
from the side of personality as well as from 
the side of science. 

In my " History of Modern Philosophy" 
I have tried to show, in a purely historical 
way, that there are four such chief prob- 
lems, namely: I. The problem of the 
nature of consciousness (the psychological 
problem); II. The problem of the valid- 
ity of knowledge (the logical problem); 
III. The problem of the nature of being 
(the cosmological problem); and IV. The 
problem of value (the moral and religious 
problem 2 ). In this treatise my task is to 
point out the inner connection between these 
problems. At bottom, they are one and 
the same problem, appearing in different 
forms and applications. 

The motives which may induce philo- 
sophical inquiry are very various. Often 
the motive is ethico-religious ; consequently, 



6 Philosophical Problems 

practical and personal. If so, one would 
begin with the fourth problem. It soon 
becomes plain, however, that its considera- 
tion demands insight into the nature of 
consciousness, into the conditions of knowl- 
edge, and into the constitution of that ex- 
istence which the ethical personality shares 
with other things. If, on the other hand, 
an interest in observation impels one, one 
will begin with the psychological problem, as 
has happened in the empiricist philosophy 
under its various forms. But if what we 
seek is rather to distinguish between what 
we can know and what we cannot know, 
we shall begin with the problem of knowl- 
edge, the path travelled by the critical 
philosophy. If, finally, one has full confi- 
dence in the possibility of thought and seeks 
a rounded world-view, one will follow the 
lead of the dogmatic and speculative schools 
and begin with the problem of Being. 
It naturally has not a little bearing on the 
form and kind of treatment, which problem 
one begins with; for one problem is easily 



Introduction 7 

overshadowed by another. In a study 
of comparative problems, to which in these 
pages I make a contribution, it is impor- 
tant to give each problem due recognition. 
Accordingly, it is my purpose — in harmony 
with the above indicated analogy between 
personality and science — to begin with the 
psychological problem, and then proceed to 
the examination of the nature of scientific 
knowledge, and to the problem of knowl- 
edge in general. If one puts the problem of 
Being third in the series, the transition to it 
comes quite naturally, either from personal- 
ity, which is one part of all being, or from 
science, whose function it is to lead us to 
a view of the existing world. The three 
problems thus far named would be set for 
us if man were only a purely intellectual, 
cognitive being. The fourth problem 
arises on account of the relation in which 
man, as a feeling and willing creature, 
stands to Being. Thus are the chief prob- 
lems of thought linked with the theoretical 
and practical interests of man. 



8 Philosophical Problems 

More important than the question as to 
the order of the problems, is the question 
whether or not they can be reduced to one 
underlying problem. Such a possibility 
seems to me to lie in the significance which 
the relation between continuity and discon- 
tinuity bears to each one of these problems. 
This relationship involves the deepest inter- 
ests of personality as well as of science. In 
both realms there is, as already noted, a 
striving after unity and connectedness, and, 
in so far, the discontinuous appears as an in- 
surmountable obstacle. On the other hand, 
it is discontinuity (distinction of time, of 
degree, of place, difference of quality, of 
individuality) which more than anything 
else brings new content, releases locked 
powers, and opens up the greatest tasks in 
the realm of life no less than in the realm 
of science. Thus it would appear that 
neither of the two elements is the only 
accredited one. It will be of unquestion- 
able interest to follow out their relations to 
each other under the four points of view 
furnished by our four chief problems. 



Introduction 9 

In the philosophy of the nineteenth cen- 
tury the significance of the problem of con- 
tinuity was thrown into prominence by the 
fact that the various schools fought over it 
in turn. In the first half of the century, 
philosophical idealism after its fashion as- 
serted the continuity of being and looked 
down on experimental science on account 
of its fragmentary character. Meanwhile, 
Positivism (as Comte and Stuart Mill ex- 
pounded it) emphasized the discontinuity 
of different groups of phenomena. Now, 
toward the end of the century, realism, 
supported by the evolutionary hypothesis, 
champions continuity, while the idealistic 
school is inclined to emphasize the un- 
avoidable discontinuity of our cognition. 3 
So the schools change places in the great 
arena on which the battle of truth must be 
fought out. Whenever a point of view ceases 
to yield significant results, the inquiry in- 
voluntarily seeks out a new one, and thus 
from ever-changing points of view thought 
advances to clearness. The different 



10 Philosophical Problems 

schools replace one another, like run- 
ners at the ancient torch festival, but the 
torch remains ever the same. And if none 
of the schools hitherto active has fully laid 
bare the central core of all these philosophi- 
cal problems, there is all the more reason 
for us to work in order that greater clear- 
ness may be shed. 




CHAPTER I 
THE PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS 



jF we begin the discussion of 
philosophical problems with the 
examination of the concept of 
personality, we enter into psy- 
chology, and have to determine first of all 
the relation of psychology to philosophy. 
We can here certainly pass by the notion 
maintained by Herbart and Lotze, that 
psychology, on account of the outlook over 
the problem of being to which it leads, 
is dependent on metaphysics or cosmology. 
On all sides there is a strenuous effort to- 
day to establish the independence of psy- 
chology. But even where this effort is 
most pronounced, opinions as to the place 
of psychology are diverse. 



12 Philosophical Problems 

Some think that psychology is identical 
with philosophy in general, and that episte- 
mology, metaphysics, aesthetics, and ethics 
are its different parts. Fries and Beneke 
took this view, and at the present time Th. 
Lipps maintains it. 4 But it is an untenable 
position, partly because the personal life is 
only one of the subjects which the philos- 
opher can pursue, and partly also because 
psychology, in common with all other 
sciences, presupposes the general forms 
and principles of knowledge. The problem 
of consciousness necessarily points beyond 
itself to the problem of being and the prob- 
lem of knowledge. In spite of all its inde- 
pendence, psychology is only one branch 
of the tree of knowledge. Psychology can 
therefore not include the whole of philosophy, 
but can only remain one of its parts. It is, 
however, entirely proper to begin with 
psychology, since it describes the place and 
the presuppositions from which we take 
our bearings in being. 

But, after all, does psychology belong to 



The Problem of Consciousness 13 

philosophy? Is it not a special science, 
which has no more to do with philosophy 
than has natural science or history? The 
special methods — the experimental, the 
physiological, and the historical — which 
the most recent psychological research em- 
ploys, appear to indicate, — do they not ? — 
that psychology stands at the very point of 
becoming a special science, and that it 
must, therefore, be sundered from philos- 
ophy ! To this I reply that in spite of all 
its special methods, psychology always pre- 
supposes the capacity of self-observation. 
It is subjective, descriptive, and analytic 
psychology which sets their several prob- 
lems to the special methods. Here we 
come upon what psychology as a special 
science and philosophy have in common. 
Philosophy must lean upon some general 
idea of the nature of conscious life, in order 
to be in a position to treat her problems of 
knowledge, of being, and of value. It is 
from personality experienced as knowing, 
as estimating worth, and as constituting a 



14 Philosophical Problems 

part of all being, that these problems emerge. 
A conception of personality is thus pre- 
supposed, which special methods cannot 
yield. These methods investigate single 
manifestations of the conscious life, and 
their investigations must be coordinated 
before a conception of personality can 
exist. 

But forthwith arises the basic problem of 
the psychological realm: Is it possible to 
arrive at a conception of personality by way 
of experience? Does our conscious life 
form a totality, a continuum, a little world 
for itself, or is it only an aggregate, a sum 
of elements and fragments? This is the 
question which philosophical psychology 
(or the philosophy of psychology, if you 
will) throws out. In handling it, psychol- 
ogy avails itself partly of self-observation 
and inner description, partly of the results 
of the experimental, physiological, and his- 
torical methods. 

Experience shows us longer or shorter 
breaks in our conscious life; there are un- 



The Problem of Consciousness 15 

conscious intervals between the conscious 
states. Upon closer examination of the 
single states of consciousness, we can dis- 
cern within them different elements, which 
are repeated in other states, so that the 
single state no less than the collective con- 
sciousness would appear to be a union of 
elements or fragments, and these elements 
would seem to be the underlying reality. 
Consciousness would then be an aggre- 
gate or synthesis of single rays. It would 
not exhibit a psychical continuum such as 
is presupposed in the conception of per- 
sonality. 

Right here it should be noted that we 
can never determine with entire certainty 
whether or not the analysis has really probed 
to the bottommost elements. There is 
always the possibility that the elements before 
which we halt and out of which we are in- 
clined to think consciousness is composed, 
are themselves, in turn, composite. And 
thus if we could pierce down to yet simpler 
elements, of the second or third order, we 



16 Philosophical Problems 

should discover a continuity which cannot 
be proved so long as we go no further than 
the elements of the first order. Our sensa- 
tions, which we have been inclined to consider 
a kind of psychical atoms, have been shown 
by recent researches of various kinds to bear 
traces of processes of composition of a still 
more elementary sort than those processes 
which observation more directly shows us. 5 
This is, however, only a preliminary sur- 
vey, leading to no decisive results, since a 
champion of discontinuity could very well 
use it to show that all apparent continuity 
is only provisional. But it is a fact of more 
decisive significance that the so-called psy- 
chical elements are always determined by 
the relations in which we find them, and 
that it is a pure abstraction to attribute 
to them, apart from these relations, an in- 
dividuality which they only possess when 
thus related. This is the fundamental 
idea on which my own account of Psy- 
chology is built. All psychic life works in 
naive fashion, and directly and involun- 



The Problem of Consciousness 17 

tarily gives birth to connected phenomena 
and events, which analysis afterwards with 
more or less skill tries to break up into 
'elements.' For the truth about sensations 
we can appeal to Fechner's law and 
the law of contrast, according to which 
the intensity and the quality of each 
sensation is determined by the whole con- 
nection in which it stands. The connec- 
tion cannot be conceived as the product of 
the psychical elements, since they only 
exist as the sensations which they are by 
virtue of their connection. If they were in 
another connection, they would not be the 
same sensations. An analogous case is 
the behavior of ideas. The association of 
ideas finds its final explanation in the 
fact that the isolation of single ideas is 
unnatural. There is always a tendency — 
the livelier the consciousness, the stronger 
the tendency — toward a rounding out or 
widening, by means of which the single 
ideas enter into combination with other 
ideas according to fixed laws. The so-called 



18 Philosophical Problems 

association-psychology (among whose ad- 
herents I have sometimes been unjustly 
numbered) conceives the single ideas as 
independent atoms, which in a purely exter- 
nal, mechanical fashion are brought into 
combination. The fact is just the reverse: 
in the process of association it is the con- 
nected whole which exercises its power 
over the single ideas. The ideas never ap- 
pear in a complete isolation such that their 
union could stand as a mechanical product. 
Here, also, we see that analysis always pre- 
supposes synthesis. This also appears clearly 
in thought, properly so called, if we compare 
the formation of judgments with that of 
concepts. They always presuppose one 
another; since our judgments, which are 
but combinations of concepts, can only be 
complete when the combined concepts are 
complete; while on the other hand, the 
formation of a concept presupposes a series 
of judgments, by which the mutual relations 
of its different elements is determined. 
Here, again, it is evident that the whole 



The Problem of Consciousness 19 

and the parts mutually determine one an- 
other. There are no thoroughly isolated 
concepts which only afterward allow them- 
selves to be bound together into judgments. 

Here crops out an antinomy which is 
closely connected with the existence of con- 
sciousness, and is peculiar to the concept of 
personality. Consciousness and personal- 
ity can as little be explained as the products 
of previously given elements, as organic life 
can be explained as the product of unor- 
ganic elements. On the other hand, con- 
sciousness and personality, just like organic 
life, come into being through a perpetual 
synthesis of elements not originally begotten 
by themselves. It is this antinomy which 
makes the genesis of life and of personality 
so great a riddle. 6 

So far, we have only considered the 
more formal connections of consciousness. 
But in every consciousness there is a goal 
that is striven towards, a dominant interest 
that makes or tries to make everything else 
subservient to itself. This dominant in- 



20 Philosophical Problems 

terest — call it the main purpose if you will 
— may change at different periods of life; 
but the tendency for it to develop will always 
be present, and it will in greater or less de- 
gree stamp its impress upon all the ele- 
ments of consciousness and give them their 
bent. This interest in the main purpose 
constitutes the soul of the individual, if we 
understand by mind the more formal in- 
tellectual part of him. 

The relationships thus far examined 
demonstrate that the concept of person- 
ality must always constitute the central 
thought of psychology. When analysis and 
special methods make their dissections, and 
attempt to isolate single elements or in- 
stants, we should grant that they are justi- 
fied, just as mathematicians are justified in 
determining an irrational number by adding 
decimal to decimal. But the irrational rela- 
tion of the whole to the elements remains. 

In the idealistic camp there has often 
been an inclination to consider the concept 
of personality as settled, and to operate with 



The Problem of Consciousness 21 

.it in cosmological speculation. This is to 
overlook the fact, emphasized especially 
by the Positivist school, that what we are so 
industriously working for is just to build up 
a concept of personality, just to spell out a 
psychological conception of the whole, even 
as biology is spelling away at a definition of 
life. But just as biology, in spite of its 
recognition of the individuality of the living 
organism, knows no other method than to 
seek, by means of observation, experiment, 
and analysis, to understand the complex 
processes through the simpler; so in like 
manner psychology, however earnestly it 
may assert the synthetic character of con- 
sciousness, can only bring into play the 
methods common to all sciences, — observa- 
tion, experiment, and analysis. The con- 
cept of personality stands as the ideal 
toward which we steer, as the enduring 
problem to whose elucidation all special 
methods contribute. 7 

The irrational here as everywhere not 
only places the limit, but also sets us the 



22 Philosophical Problems 

task, the ever new task. Descriptive psy- 
chology especially tends to lay stress on the 
connected whole in and with which the 
psychical manifestation appears. It will 
always — but especially in respect to the 
higher or more developed manifestations of 
consciousness — preserve its independence 
and significance as over against experimental 
psychology. In fact, experimental psychol- 
ogy invariably has its tasks set for it by 
descriptive psychology. At the same time, 
descriptive psychology serves as a correc- 
tive to experimental psychology which, by 
its very methods, easily tends to overisolate 
single elements, to neglect the spontaneity 
of the conscious life, and to overemphasize 
the external symptoms of inner states. 8 On 
the other hand, descriptive psychology can 
levy tribute from experimental psychology, 
turning whatever light it may yield as to the 
more elementary psychological processes, by 
analogy, upon the nature of the higher 
processes, and thus giving greater complete- 
ness and accuracy to the description. 



The Problem of Consciousness 2} 

Descriptive psychology comes very near 
to being an art; indeed, it is verily an art: 
while experimental psychology approximates 
to a science. But they are not in principle 
different from one another. They are not 
separated by a chasm, as Munsterberg 9 
recently would maintain, making the one a 
science of worth, the other a natural science ; 
holding that the one deals with the concept 
of freedom, the other with the concept of 
causality. By freedom Munsterberg under- 
stands the possibility of acting according to 
purpose. Then should not the psychical 
event, by which a man sets himself a pur- 
pose for whose accomplishment he will work, 
be an object of scientific psychology? And 
can such an event be understood except by 
being investigated in its connection with the 
simpler processes which take place in the 
constitution of pleasure and pain, joy and 
sorrow, or in the union and separation of 
ideas? Here there are a multitude of ex- 
periences to be gone through with and 
collected; it is a question of following out 



24 Philosophical Problems 

a development step by step, of determining 
the different degrees of consciousness, and 
the various impulses and motives which 
accompany them. We must, furthermore, 
distinguish between the various individual 
types which the form and direction of the 
volitional life may show. A comparative 
psychology of individuals can supply just 
the assistance needed in order to understand 
the development which takes place in the 
consciousness of a particular individual. 
An utterly unnatural distinction, therefore, 
is set up if a sharp antithesis between the 
categories of the personal and the psycho- 
physical is asserted; especially is this true 
when this antithesis is made the corner- 
stone of an antithesis between 'truth of life' 
and ' truth of science. ' 10 Is it not just the 
function of science to understand life — 
even although a complete understanding may 
always remain an ideal, — and does not 
life itself furnish science with all her empiri- 
cal materials? Thus there is an abiding 
relation of interaction instead of an abso- 



The Problem of Consciousness 25 

lute antithesis. And there are many con- 
necting links and bonds between the 
separation of the elements of Being under- 
taken by science and the complex inter- 
play of all the elements presented by life, 
an interplay which only art can set forth in 
all its fulness. 



But there are still grave difficulties re- 
maining in the scientific treatment of the 
phenomena of consciousness. The proof 
of a continuity in the processes under inves- 
tigation is necessary to a true understanding. 
We should reach the ideal of psychology 
not only if we could secure such a complete 
description of states of consciousness that 
each state would stand as a proper member 
of the whole psychical process, but also if 
we could reduce the differences of the chang- 
ing states to such simple forms that any 
succeeding state would appear as the con- 
tinuation or as the transformation of the 
preceding state. The prospect of reaching 



26 Philosophical Problems 

this ideal, however, is blocked by the 
discontinuity which experience appears to 
interpose. There are unconscious intervals 
between our conscious states — in swoons, 
in dreamless sleep (in so far as there is any), 
and there are qualitative differences between 
the different states and elements of con- 
sciousness, so that each state and each ele- 
ment, if we adhere to a strictly introspective 
view, appears to arise from nothing. Then 
between the different individual conscious- 
nesses there is always an abrupt and strik- 
ing discontinuity: one consciousness can 
even less be derived from another than one 
state of consciousness from another. 

This relation of psychical discontinuity 
stands out with peculiar sharpness when it 
is set over against the continuity and the 
equivalence which material manifestations 
present, and which was noted very early 
in philosophy. The persistence of matter 
in spite of all its transformations was a 
common assumption with the Greek natural 
philosophers, and this assumption has been 



The Problem of Consciousness 2j 

confirmed by modern chemistry. In sharp 
contrast with this is the separation of minds 
from each other. When Descartes applied 
the concept of substance to the psychical 
as well as to the physical realm, he did it 
with the important distinction that many 
soul-substances, but only a single material 
substance, were assumed. 11 Thereby he 
sharply and decisively asserted psychical 
discontinuity in antithesis to physical con- 
tinuity. In the history of philosophy, it is 
only in a partly or wholly mystical sense 
that we find such an assertion of the continu- 
ity of soul-life that the single consciousness 
may be conceived as bearing a relation to 
the universal soul- substance like the relation 
of single bodies to the universe of matter. 
So Averroes, Spinoza, and Hegel. 12 In 
recent years attention has been fixed less 
on the discontinuity between the individual 
consciousnesses than on the discontinuity 
within each consciousness, and two lines of 
consideration, preeminently, have led to a 
more critical exposition of this modern 
problem. 



28 Philosophical Problems 

Thanks to the reform which swept 
through physiology in the middle of the 
nineteenth century, this science has attained 
to a fuller consciousness of its methods and 
of its independence. Consequently, it now 
demands that every brain- state shall be ex- 
plained through the preceding states of the 
brain and of the organism, — that physio- 
logical phenomena shall be explained solely 
by physiological causes, or else by activities 
of the physical environment continued in 
the organism. According to strict scientific 
methods, every material state within and 
without the organism finds its explanation 
as soon as we make it clear that each state 
has arisen from the transformation of 
energy released in the preceding states. 
When one brain-state succeeds another we 
reach an explanation of their relation only 
when we have demonstrated that all the 
energy released in the first has been 
transformed into tissue- building, warmth, 
electricity, motor impulses, etc. It is 
certainly difficult to think out the arrange- 



The Problem of Consciousness 29 

ment of such an experiment; but the 
carrying out of the physiological method 
would indicate the solution. Even the 
so-called neo- vitalism recognizes no other 
method of investigating. Spinoza con- 
firms this when he says that an appeal to 
the interference of the soul in order to ex- 
plain a corporeal state is an admission that 
we do not know its cause. If an experiment 
were to indicate that at the origin of an 
organic state energy came into being or 
disappeared without any physical equivalent, 
we should certainly rather believe that the 
experiment was in error than congratulate 
ourselves over the result. "The principle 
of the conservation of energy," says Max- 
well, 13 "has acquired so great scientific 
weight, . . . that no physiologist would feel 
any confidence in an experiment which 
showed considerable difference between the 
work done by an animal and the balance of 
the account of energy received and spent. " 
A carrying out of physiological methods 
conceived in this spirit will give evidence of 



30 Philosophical Problems 

an ever greater continuity of the organic 
processes to which the manifestations of 
consciousness show themselves actually to 
be united. 

Physiology is therefore far more favorably 
disposed toward the principle of continuity 
than psychology ever can be, and thus it 
appears to be a point very well taken when 
Karl Lange demands that all psychological 
definitions be replaced by physiological. 14 
Psychical manifestations would then stand 
only as provisional indices or symptoms. 

The other view fits closely on to the one 
already cited, but is a kind of general theory 
of knowledge. It rests upon the proposition 
that a complete understanding can be won 
only where the relation between cause and 
effect can be reduced to a relation of identity 
or continuity, so that a quantitative equa- 
tion between the phenomena bound up 
in the causal relation becomes possible. 
This is an assertion of the ideal concept 
of causality (as contrasted with the empirical 
laws of causation) as the ground through 



The Problem of Consciousness 31 

which the qualitatively different mani- 
festations are bound together into an in- 
variable succession. I postpone a closer 
examination of both these concepts till we 
reach the problem of knowledge. For 
the present, I will only remark that we 
unquestionably obtain a more complete 
understanding where the ideal concept of 
causality can be carried through, than where 
we must abide by empirical laws of causa- 
tion — and then often enough not see clearly 
into their application. Material as well as 
mental manifestations display qualitative 
distinctions; but in the material sphere 
it is possible to conceive these qualitative 
distinctions as quantitative, by means of 
the law of the conservation of energy and 
of matter, while nothing similar in the 
psychical sphere is possible. Therefore, it 
is assumed that the correct psychological 
method consists in substituting the physio- 
logical manifestations for the corresponding 
psychical ones; that this is the only way 
of replacing qualitative determinations by 



32 Philosophical Problems 

quantitative, and so of carrying out a strict 
causal connection. This conception of the 
psychological problem is applied with rigor 
by Richard Avenarius in his acute Kritik 
der reinen Erjahrung. He demands as the 
condition of a complete scientific under- 
standing a tracing back of 'the depend- 
ent vital series' (by which he understands 
psychical states) to 'the independent vital 
series' (the corresponding physiological 
states) through which alone it becomes pos- 
sible to reduce empirical differences to the 
lowest possible degree, or as Avenarius ex- 
presses it, to reach a 'heterotic minimum.' 
Munsterberg inclines to a similar view, as 
he has expressed himself in his "Psychol- 
ogy and Life." His thesis is this: Since 
psychical manifestations are not quantita- 
tive, they cannot be members of a causal 
series. 15 

In excuse of those who thus try to reduce 
psychology to physiology in order that a 
scientific psychology may be made pos- 
sible, — who, therefore, virtually wish to 



The Problem of Consciousness 33 

abolish psychology in order to make it into 
a science, — it is to be noted that the 
actual discontinuities and qualitative differ- 
ences of psychical phenomena will always 
more or less oppose limits to the carry- 
ing out of a strictly scientific psychology. 
Whether the way pointed out by such 
writers leads to the goal, and whether the 
method recommended does not contain a 
palpable self-contradiction — these are other 
questions. 

If it is desired to supersede psychological 
definitions by physiological, it is evidently 
presupposed that psychological definitions 
are already in existence. The creation of 
these definitions must be the part of psy- 
chology; and if it can itself make no clear- 
cut definitions, assuredly physiology cannot 
ascertain for it what it should seek in the 
bram an explanation for. If what is to be 
superseded be vague and uncertain, then 
what supersedes it will likewise be vague 
and uncertain. And we cannot derive 
certainty from the fact that we have actually 



34 Philosophical Problems 

discovered the brain-states which correspond 
to psychical manifestations observed in the 
act. The independence of psychology must 
be recognized in any event, since it prescribes 
— like a kind of symptomatology — the 
work of physiology. It is a long and difficult 
task to find adequate definitions in any 
experimental science; they only become 
possible when the science has actually 
reached completeness ; they come at the end, 
not at the beginning of the investigation. 
Only too often have crude psychological 
definitions been considered trustworthy start- 
ing-points for the investigations of brain 
physiology. So Descartes, and in recent 
times Lotze, considered the idea of the ' soul' 
as so plain and self-evident that physiology 
and anatomy could calmly be called upon 
to search out 'the seat of the soul.' Re- 
cently Flechsig 16 has held the notion of 
'association' to be so simple and clear as 
well as so independent, that he has been 
able to persuade himself that he has found 
a special place in the brain for the func- 



The Problem of Consciousness 35 

tions indicated by this notion. Flechsig's 
reliance on the highly incomplete concept 
of association shows that psychological 
experiment never reveals absolutely simple 
psychical elements which are brought into 
combination afterwards by means of a 
special process. The association-process 
cannot be set up as the positive antithesis of 
those processes through which the single 
psychical elements (sensations and ideas) 
originate. Flechsig operates with a psy- 
chological abstraction, not with a true 
psychological definition. Against Flechsig's 
doctrine of special association-centres, ana- 
tomical objections have been raised from 
many directions, which I cannot pass upon ; 
but the psychological inadequacy of his 
concept of association sufficiently shows how 
difficult an undertaking it is to replace 
psychological with physiological concep- 
tions. 17 It seems to me that an excellent 
occasion for criticising Flechsig's theory is 
afforded by the following considerations. 
When there are psychical elements which 



36 Philosophical Problems 

enter into no such association as may be 
expected under customary relations, this 
condition will prove on nearer investigation 
to have been caused by the fact that the 
respective elements, each for itself, are 
welded in other firmer associational rela- 
tionships from which they cannot loosen 
themselves. In any case, in psychological 
inquiry, the task always is to find the 
antecedent associations which, later, on 
their own account, hinder 'natural' asso- 
ciation. If we sever the conceptions 'ele- 
ment' and 'association' from one another, 
we foster thereby a false psychology as well 
as a false physiology. Long and patient 
investigation is still necessary for the creation 
of the definition of a concept like 'associa- 
tion'; and physiology must wait a long time 
if it would ' supplant ' a psychological reality 
and no bare abstraction. 

But even supposing psychological defini- 
tions were already complete and ready to 
hand, would not the greatest problems 
still remain unsolved? How can physio- 



The Problem of Consciousness 37 

logical states have psychical symptoms? 
How can qualitative differences correspond 
to quantitative, and how can discontinuous 
phenomena be united with continuous pro- 
cesses? The fact is that if such questions 
are thought to be snuffed out by the reduction 
of psychology to physiology, they will only 
blaze up again hotter and brighter than be- 
fore. In any event it remains an unsolved 
riddle how qualitative differences and dis- 
continuity arise. Even if it could be demon- 
strated that two ideas, A and B, heretofore 
considered different, were identical, so that 
we could say A = B, we would not thereby 
have explained how A and B could appear 
different in the first place. To call this 
distinction 'subjective' doesn't help in the 
least; it will not thereby be blotted out of 
being. Indeed, the fact that Being also 
has a subjective side is just what makes 
psychology possible and necessary. If, with 
Munsterberg, we hold that these subjective 
phenomena can be neither described nor 
explained, 18 it is not easy to understand how 



38 Philosophical Problems 

we get hold of anything at all to place in 
our 'causal equation.' It is of a piece 
with the man who sawed off the very limb 
on which he himself was sitting. 

It is illogical to deny a causal relation 
between psychical phenomena, if a causal 
relation is assumed between the correspond- 
ing physiological states. If we recognize a 
standard of physiological law, we must also 
recognize a standard of psychological law. 
If the psychical phenomenon a corresponds 
to the brain-state A, and the psychical 
phenomenon ft to the brain- state B, and if 
a causal relation occurs between A and B, 
then in psychological experience there must 
appear a causal relation between a and y8 
in the sense of an inevitable series. As 
demonstrated above, it is, in fact, only this 
causal relation between a and /3, that makes 
us seek a causal relation between A and B. 
In Avenarius's carrying out of a reduction 
of psychology (the doctrine of the 'depend- 
ent vital series') to physiology (the doctrine 
of the 'independent vital series') it is mani- 



The Problem of Consciousness 39 

fest at every step that he infers the consti- 
tution of his independent vital series from 
that of the dependent series. Customa- 
rily, one constructs a physiological scheme 
chiefly to have a visual symbol of what takes 
place in the psychical processes. Neither 
physiology nor psychology has yet attained 
such completeness that we can dispense with 
such a schematic symbol. 

Psychical phenomena, however, do not 
present such great discontinuity or such pure 
qualitative differences as is often believed. 
Careful observation repeatedly leads to the 
discovery that where there appeared to be a 
psychical void, there was in fact a psychical 
content, although attention or recollection 
did not lay hold of it, and although it was 
forgotten immediately after the experience. 
On the other hand, with respect to quali- 
tative differences, a more careful examina- 
tion reveals also more numerous and fine 
shadings than those at which we had hitherto 
halted, — and which we had tranquilly ex- 
plained to be entirely disparate. The con- 



40 Philosophical Problems 

tinuity of consciousness can thus be traced 
farther than is often assumed; and qualita- 
tive difference and discontinuity, if too 
strongly proclaimed as the essential trait of 
consciousness, can become a peril to science. 
The inner connection of the various con- 
tents of consciousness is likewise a fact, and 
functions like memory and comparison are 
no whit less significant as characteristics of 
consciousness than the phenomena which 
bear the stamp of discontinuity. The task 
of psychology is therefore to demonstrate as 
far as possible the connection and the com- 
bination of the single elements, so that the 
totality will be intelligible through the part, 
and the part through its relation to the 
totality. That this ' leads to an antinomy 
which makes the psychological problem ul- 
timately insoluble, has already been made 
plain (p. 19). But there is work enough to 
do ere we arrive at this limit (whose absolute- 
ness, moreover, cannot be proved). Leibniz 
has the merit of having doggedly championed 
the principle of continuity in the psychical 



The Problem of Consciousness 41 

as well as in the physical realm, especially 
because he pointed out the little psychical 
elements, — vanishing in comparison with 
the clearly conscious states — which only 
through summation and combination yield 
tangible results to unpractised self-observa- 
tion. A comparison of modern with ancient 
or mediaeval poetry shows how vastly larger 
a number of mental differences self-obser- 
vation has now recorded ; but the discovery 
of this larger world can hardly be due to the 
fact that the differentiation of the psychical 
realm is greater now than formerly. The 
knowledge and the understanding of the 
immediate and involuntary in the life of the 
soul has wonderfully increased. The psy- 
chology of children and of primitive man is 
inclined to treat everything that goes on 
in the soul as clearly conscious, and as rest- 
ing on reflection and intention. In modern 
psychology, the burden of proof — in prac- 
tice as well as in theory — has shifted to the 
other side : now it rests on him who asserts 
that an act has been performed with refiec- 



42 Philosophical Problems 

tion and express determination. The actual 
passage out of the unconscious into the 
conscious ; and within the conscious, out of 
the involuntary into the voluntary; takes 
place continually; indeed, the more expert 
self- observation and criticism become, the 
more difficult it becomes to lay the finger on 
the exact point where the boundary lies. 

Leibniz was inclined to reduce all psychi- 
cal differences to differences in degree of 
clearness and obscurity. 19 This attempt was 
characteristic of the intellectualism of the 
century of the Aufklarung. But empirical 
psychology can represent a continuous con- 
nection in another way than by means of 
such a reduction, in spite of the qualitative 
differences which psychical processes exhibit 
in their various stages. In the different 
stages of consciousness there are blendings 
and combinations which embrace the sim- 
plest emotions as well as the highest states 
of feeling. Furthermore, there are shiftings 
of motive which bestow immediate worth 
on what at first had worth only as a means, 



The Problem of Consciousness 43 

or vice versa. Finally, the conscious life of 
strong personalities, the highest and noblest 
objects of psychology, presents such a de- 
pendence of all mental impulses on a single 
purpose, a single leading thought, that we 
here find a causal connection not a whit 
less firm and inward than any that appears 
in the physical realm. Every single thought, 
every single mood, and every single motive 
in such a character is clearly determined 
by the totality to which it belongs and to 
whose upbuilding it contributes. 

There remain cases enough where we 
cannot demonstrate psychical continuity. 
But the question is whether on that account 
we have the right to deny its existence. 
Herewith, turning aside from the point as to 
what continuous observation can ascertain, 
we are confronted with the important ques- 
tion whether psychical phenomena can 
arise from material causes, when once for all 
we conceive of matter as natural science has 
hitherto conceived of it. If the scientific 
idea of matter includes no provision for 



44 Philosophical Problems 

the arising of psychical phenomena, we 
shall be fully warranted in advancing the 
notion of a potential psychical energy, in 
order to emphasize the fact that we will 
not at once surrender the principle of con- 
tinuity because in practice we cannot apply 
it to a concrete case. On just such grounds, 
the notion of potential energy, despite the 
obscurity enshrouding it, has been intro- 
duced into physics. Everywhere the notion 
implies the recognition of limits, beyond 
which we nevertheless do not wish to re- 
nounce a connection traced thus far. The 
fact that psychical elements can reproduce 
themselves after an interval in which they 
were not in consciousness, compels the em- 
ployment of such notions as 'disposition/ 
'trace,' 'possibility,' and the like, which 
in fact express exactly what is meant by 
'potential energy.' The fact that we are 
more inclined to use this notion in the phys- 
ical than in the psychical realm, 20 by no 
means excludes the correctness and necessity 
of its use in the latter. In a purely descrip- 



The Problem of Consciousness 4S 

live account, one can often be content to 
indicate the various psychical phenomena 
emerging at certain moments, without ob- 
serving their mutual psychical connection. 
Psychical phenomena show themselves in 
such a case as separate flashes, in strong 
contrast to the continuous connection 
which the corresponding physiological 
phenomena exhibit. And since whatever 
emerges with the highest degree of continu- 
ity easily impresses us as more real than the 
discontinuous and flashlike, the physiological 
phenomena readily seem to us to be the 
very reality, the real phenomena, and the 
psychical phenomena seem to exist as an 
overflow, a chance addition, or, as they have 
been called, as epiphenomena. Such an 
' epiphenomenalism ' has hardly yet been 
advanced as a distinct theory; it is only an 
empirical confession that there is something 
enigmatical in the appearance of psychical 
phenomena in comparison with the closer 
continuity in the series of material phe- 
nomena. It really gives no solution, it 



46 Philosophical Problems 

abolishes rather every psychological as 
well as physiological explanation if it 
pretends to be more than a description. 
Even as a description it easily over- 
reaches itself, because it often comes to 
a halt before the discontinuous without 
investigating whether or not it could find 
still more transitions and conjunctive shad- 
ings than had already appeared. The notion 
of potential psychical energy — just because 
it is only the expression for an unsolved 
problem — turns into an ever-present exhor- 
tation to prosecute observation and analysis 
in order to discover as far as possible the 
reality in which the ' potentiality ■ ultimately 
consists. 

3 

If, on the psychological as well as on 
the physiological side, we emphasize the 
quest of continuity in the highest possible 
degree, then the hypothesis of identity be- 
comes the real working hypothesis of both 
the psychical and the physiological problem. 



The Problem of Consciousness 47 

Like every other hypothesis that means 
anything practical, this is only an expression 
for a method. In psychical and physiologi- 
cal phenomena we have two serial forms of 
states, which experience shows us to vary 
in certain reciprocal relations, without its 
being possible to deduce the existence of 
the one series from the existence of the other 
series. Scientifically considered, the task 
now is, to conceive each of the two series by 
itself as completely and continuously as pos- 
sible and to show which definite members 
of the one series correspond to certain 
members of the other series. We can with 
right consider members of one series as 
symptoms of members of the other series. 
Now it is the psychical, now again the 
physiological states, which are most pal- 
pable to us, and of which we make our start- 
ing-point. The close interrelationship of the 
two series of states makes it impossible to 
trace them back to two different ' beings' 
or ' things ' ; it comes entirely natural to 
conceive them as different manifestations of 



48 Philosophical Problems 

one and the same 'being.' Because two 
properties cannot be derived from one 
another, one has no right to conclude that 
they belong to two different things, par- 
ticularly not if they vary in fixed reciprocal 
ratios. The consistency of sulphur (hard, 
liquid, etc.) and its color (yellow, brown, 
etc.) vary in a fixed reciprocal relation and 
yet they cannot be derived from one another, 
although one who knows both the series of 
variations can make inferences from the 
one to the other. With reference to sul- 
phur, we know the general cause of both 
series, namely, heat, which here manifests 
itself in two different ways. With reference 
to the relation between the psychical and the 
physiological series, the corresponding knowl- 
edge is denied us. Our experience is here 
incompetent to solve the problem. This 
is closely connected with the fact that our 
knowledge of both the psychical and the 
physical is empirically limited. Therefore, 
the task now is, to work forward in both 
realms of experience so that one does not at 



The Problem of Consciousness 49 

any point arbitrarily sever the hidden con- 
necting thread. 

Physiological continuity is both a conse- 
quence of the law of the conservation of 
energy (and indeed of the doctrine of 
inertia in its stricter interpretation) and 
an expression of the independence of phys- 
iology as a science. It supplies a fruitful 
and indispensable principle of research, 
since it continually strives after evidence 
of physiological causes and results of physi- 
ological states. As we saw above, we have 
in continuity a principle so essential that, 
if an experiment were to point in the oppo- 
site direction, the experimenter would rather 
assume an error in the experiment than a 
violation of the principle. The principle 
of continuity — and with it the hypothesis 
of identity — would be refuted, if it could be 
proved that the energy contained in a brain- 
state stood in no relation of equivalence to 
the preceding and succeeding states in the 
brain, in the organism, and in the physical 
environment. 



50 Philosophical Problems 

It would be already dangerous for the hy- 
pothesis of identity if it could but be demon- 
strated that the psychical phenomena come 
before or follow after the physiological states. 
In an attempt to demonstrate this it would 
not be enough to show, as popular obser- 
vation already shows, that the perception 
arises later than the corresponding sense 
impression or earlier than the physiological 
(motor, especially vaso-motor) manifesta- 
tions, which somehow stand in combination 
with it. For, between the psychical states 
and the peripheral processes in the sense- 
organs and motor-organs, lie the central 
physiological processes which direct experi- 
ment cannot so easily touch, and even were 
such a direct experiment possible, it would 
not be decisive. For example, if the phe- 
nomena B follows after A, still A and B 
might conceivably be results of the same 
cause, which begat first the result A and 
then the result B. Special causes might 
bring it about that one vital phenomenon 
should change more rapidly than the other. 



The Problem of Consciousness 51 

It would be a decisive proof against the 
hypothesis of identity if it could be proved 
that different psychical phenomena could 
correspond to one and the same physiologi- 
cal state. Some have thought, for example, 
that the significance of the brain for con- 
scious life consists in the fact that it coun- 
teracts the tendency of organic life to 
become too habitual and automatic. The 
brain has a wonderful power of initiating 
new movements, which, as soon as they 
have been learned, become habits whose 
further execution is turned over to lower cen- 
tres. Only by the assistance of the brain 
has thought freed itself from automatism 
and been able to press the organism into 
its service without being brought under the 
yoke of habit. Different thoughts, however, 
might call into requisition at different times 
the same 'motor scheme,' the same inhibi- 
tion of an automatic tendency. Bergson 
has recently advanced this possibility as a 
remonstrance against 'strict parallelism.' 21 
The remonstrance raises one question to 



52 Philosophical Problems 

which only very slight attention has been 
paid in the extensive discussion over the 
psychophysical problem. Whether one as- 
sents to the special theories adduced by the 
French philosopher or not, this much ap- 
pears to be clear, — that the closer one comes 
to the problem in real life, the more ex- 
ceedingly difficult it becomes to find the 
members in the two series of phenomena 
which can be pointed out as 'correspond- 
ing.' Where terms qualitatively differ, one 
can only indirectly determine which terms 
are correspondent. If we knew how warmth 
works on the color and how on the form of 
a substance, then we could determine which 
color- and form-changes mutually 'corre- 
spond.' But unfortunately no such knowl- 
edge stands at our disposal for the clearing 
up of the psychophysical problem: we 
are shut up to purely empirical conclu- 
sions, and these are here harder to draw 
than Bergson appears to think. Even if 
one lays adequate emphasis on the continu- 
ity element both in the psychological and in 



The Problem of Consciousness 53 

the physiological realm, yet it will prove 
difficult to break the two series up into 
members that will stand out with such 
individuality that a true comparison can 
be instituted. Whichever hypothesis we 
build on, we must be prepared to find that 
the very members of the two series which are 
considered to correspond will exhibit differ- 
ences which cannot be derived from the 
one or the other member by itself alone. 
It might, therefore, be altogether possible 
that 'different' psychical phenomena would 
correspond to the 'same' physiological state 
(or vice versa), as sometimes one language 
has only a single word where another has 
two words. The determining factor must re- 
main the actual fact of connection, and this 
will certainly, both in the psychological and 
in the physiological realm, be so decisive, 
that one must speak of phenomena or states 
as 'the same' with only a degree of approx- 
imation. Still, ' parallelism ' will not be taken 
aback by that objection, if we make a suffi- 
ciently strong claim that the states shall 
really be 'alike.' 



54 Philosophical Problems 

It is, essentially, as a working hypothesis, 
not as a positive solution, that the hypothe- 
sis of identity (for which ' parallelism ' and 
similar expressions are inadequate and 
misleading designations) gets its signifi- 
cance. For my part, in any case, I have 
always championed it as 'an empirical 
formula' which may so lead us in our 
investigations that neither the rights of 
physiology nor the rights of psychology will 
be violated by a too early cessation of our 
investigation in either of the two realms. 
Physiology may be tempted to give up the 
search prematurely if it expects to run into 
the 'soul' at some point as the cause of 
the change of the state of the brain; 22 and 
psychology is subject to the same temptation 
if it expects at some other point to con- 
front a psychical phenomenon which has its 
causes in a 'nerve process' or in 'nerve 
energy. ' 

4 

Both sides, the psychological equally 
with the physiological, will still find their 



The Problem of Consciousness 55 

own interest to lie in getting as near as pos- 
sible to one another, in endeavoring to get 
back, each to the fundamental fact of Being 
which its peculiar phase of experience pre- 
sents. 

On the psychological side, the idea of will, 
taken in the broadest sense as the idea of 
psychical activity, will appear as the funda- 
mental idea. This statement may seem 
to be undermined by the fact that of late 
many psychological writers even attempt to 
cast the idea of will out of psychology, not 
because they deny what in popular speech is 
called the will, but because they think that 
this idea indicates a point of view by no 
means so fundamental as cognition and 
feeling, since the so-called phenomena of 
will can be traced back to special combina- 
tions of elements of knowing and feeling. 
In support of this contention, we may cite 
the fact that the will as such, our activity 
as the activity of a conscious being, cannot 
be an object of immediate self -observation 
like ideas and feelings. 23 We observe the 



56 Philosophical Problems 

motives and the result of the will, but not the 
will itself, just as in the sphere of material 
nature we observe the conditions and phe- 
nomena of energy, but not energy itself. 
Hume demonstrated this truth with reference 
to all causality, psychical as well as material. 
The idea of will, like the idea of energy, 
is created by means of a construction, — 
a construction which we are, however, 
compelled to undertake. If one defines 
a psychical element, not as something 
that must be susceptible of becoming 
the object of direct self-observation, but 
so that it indicates an essential and irre- 
ducible unit of the conscious life, then the 
will can quite conceivably be a psychical 
element and the concept of the will a fun- 
damental psychical concept. The reason 
why we cannot make the will the object of 
self-observation like sensations, ideas, and 
feelings may lie in the fact that the will as a 
persistent presupposition envelops all the 
changing states and forms of the conscious 
life. Consciousness exists only on account 



The Problem of Consciousness $7 

of the uninterrupted work of collecting the 
single elements into a totality. Such a work 
of combination and concentration is evident 
in the simplest sensation as much as in every 
ideation, every feeling, every impulse, every 
determination. At every point an activity 
manifests itself, which is just as original a 
phase of conscious life as the elements 
(phases or attributes) which observation 
and analysis directly light upon. The real 
state of affairs is not that we first had sen- 
sations, ideas, and feelings, and that then 
through combination something came into 
being that we might call the will. Without 
an original combination, without a primary 
synthetic process, even the elements which 
determine the will in the narrower sense 
could not arise. In the special manifesta- 
tions of will (reflex action, impulse, desire, 
purpose, determination) the primary power 
of concentration exhibits itself in a special 
way under the influence of certain determi- 
nate elements of knowing and feeling. 24 
Consequently, there is incessant reciprocal 



58 Philosophical Problems 

action taking place between the activity- 
elements, the volitional elements proper, 
and the intellectual and emotional elements. 
Here, again, we meet the antinomy, men- 
tioned above in Section i, which prevails 
in all conscious life, and indeed, on the 
whole, in all life. But the chief point is 
that we can already form, purely psycho- 
logically, a concept of energy, because, 
wherever a psychical phenomenon appears, 
a psychical operation must have been per- 
formed, since such a phenomenon, so far 
as we can fathom it, always presupposes 
a synthesis. The psychical operation in 
which the synthesis consists is the greater, 
the more the single elements differ quali- 
tatively, and the farther they are separated 
in time. 

We might now be decoyed into immedi- 
ately identifying this psychical energy with 
the energy working in the nerve-tissue. 
But since not all neural processes are con- 
nected with conscious phenomena, we must 
distinguish between conscious and uncon- 



'Hoe Problem of Consciousness 59 

scious nerve-energy, and consequently the 
problem presents itself anew. Moreover, 
we know nothing in detail about this so- 
called nerve-energy or about its relation to 
other organic and inorganic forms of energy. 
If we consider, with Ostwald 25 and others, 
the riddle solved by setting up the concept 
of ' nerve-energy, ' we only introduce a 
qualitas occulta and soothe ourselves with 
that. The natural science concept of en- 
ergy, wherever one meets with it, is always 
abstracted from phenomena with geomet- 
rical properties. Natural science knows 
energy only as the expression of the relation 
between spatial phenomena. The riddle 
would be solved only if we could form a 
concept of energy from which both the psy- 
chological and the natural science concep- 
tions could be derived as special forms; 
but we still lack the means of constructing 
such a conception. At all events, any attempt 
in this direction would carry us beyond the 
domain of the psychological problem. 



CHAPTER II 



THE PROBLEM OF KNOWLEDGE 




OT only psychological under- 
standing but, in general, all 
understanding is conditioned by 
the relation between continuity 
and discontinuity. The latter occasions 
the fulness and multiplicity of the content 
of the understanding, the former its con- 
nection and arrangement. Our under- 
standing of things appears under different 
leading forms which correspond to the 
sciences. 

I understand what something is if I recall 
it; thus I understand or know who is ap- 
proaching, if I recall the person approaching. 
Recollection rests on the connection existing 
between the new and the old experiences. 
In the act of recollection, all intervening 
60 



The Problem of Knowledge 61 

experiences are forced to one side and the 
new phenomenon is directly or indirectly, 
involuntarily or after some reflection, 28 
identified with an earlier presented phe- 
nomenon. Contrast with the new is also 
at work here; the recognized quality is 
thrown into the stronger relief the more 
unrecognized its present surroundings are. 
Recollection makes description and classi- 
fication possible, yet the idea of difference 
is actually at work in both operations. In 
all description and classification a certain 
type stands fast, at least provisionally, and 
the new phenomena are referred back to it, 
either as fully like (covering each other), or 
as qualitatively similar, or as analogous (sim- 
ilar in their relations). The positive con- 
cepts which we form embody such types. 
Where, for some reason, we can sum- 
mon no recollection of similar phenomena 
and, consequently can set up no type, we 
collect the phenomena for the time being 
under a negative concept; that is, we give 
them the general mark of being different 



62 Philosophical Problems 

from the types previously defined. In the 
history of classification, negative concepts 
have the merit of having made possible 
the collection of the hitherto undefined into 
a group different from the defined group, 
leaving it to later investigation to find within 
it positive definitions. 27 

In the history of philosophy, Plato's 
doctrine of ideas stands as the characteristic 
expression of the importance of descriptive 
and concept-forming investigation. Even 
the possibility of recollection in the midst 
of the confused multiplicity of phenomena 
filled Plato with emotion. To him, the 
highest power of the mind was that by 
which the different types underlying recol- 
lection were arranged according to their 
mutual likenesses and differences, so that 
a Thought- world reared itself in which one 
could mount up and down upon a continu- 
ously serial ladder. 

When concepts have been formed in 
different connections, they can be united into 
judgments, and when different judgments 



The Problem of Knowledge 6} 

have common concepts which can be substi- 
tuted for one another, conclusions can be 
drawn. By way of inference, concepts and 
judgments can be formed without having 
to go back to the experiences to which 
the descriptive and classifying sciences are 
bound at every point. There prevails here 
a continuity of a higher kind, since thoughts 
and thought- series of extremely different 
origin can be brought into combination. 
While recollection rests only on identity, 
judgment rests on rationality; here the 
relation between ground and consequence 
rules, and makes possible a new kind of 
understanding. I understand that A = C, 
if I know that A = B and B = C. This 
kind of understanding is acquired by means 
of the formal sciences. It is peculiar to 
these sciences that it makes no difference 
whence the first judgments and conclu- 
sions sprang, if only they have such a con- 
stitution that series of conclusions can be 
built on them. So the descriptive sciences 
do not concern themselves about the origin 



64 Philosophical Problems 

of phenomena, so long as these allow them- 
selves to be arranged according to relations 
of likeness and difference. 

A third kind of understanding is to be 
found, where one neither advances merely 
from phenomena to concepts, nor merely 
builds new conceptual combinations by con- 
clusions from given conceptual combina- 
tions; but where, on the contrary, one 
deduces new phenomena from previously 
given phenomena. The new phenomena 
are understood, when we think their relation 
to earlier phenomena to be analogous to 
that between the ground and the conse- 
quence 0} an inference. This kind of un- 
derstanding characterizes natural science as 
it has developed especially since the Re- 
naissance. In it the concept of causality is 
supreme. We combine experiences by it 
according to their inevitable and law-deter- 
mined succession. 

It is this third kind of understanding 
that has especially concerned the modern 
theory of knowledge, since Hume and Kant 



The Problem of Knowledge 65 

pointed out the distinction between a logical 
inference and a real causal explanation. The 
possibility of creating and making use of 
the concept of causality has in modern 
times aroused an astonishment like that 
aroused in Plato's time by the creation of 
general concepts. It is, however, not only 
the intellectual necessity of finding a con- 
nection between experiences that has led 
to giving such prominence to the concept of 
causality, but also the necessity of distinguish- 
ing sharply between subjective ideas and 
objective reality. And this rests on the 
fact that the criterion of reality in doubtful 
cases is always, in the last analysis, the 
firm, inseparable connection of phenomena. 28 
The world of dreams and of thought is greater 
than that of reality (" narrow is the world and 
the mind is wide"), and man is under the 
constant and pressing necessity of so de- 
termining and combining his thoughts that 
they may stand as manifestations of a reality, 
since only thus can he expect to find the 
means of realizing his purposes. 



66 Philosophical Problems 

The causal concept appears under two 
aspects: under a provisional, elementary 
form, with which we are often compelled 
to be content; and under an ideal aspect 
which all research and all theories strive 
after. The elementary causal concept pre- 
sents only an unconditional succession: if 
the phenomenon A appears, then B in- 
evitably follows, and B only appears when 
A has preceded it. It is not asserted that 
the causal relation holds between A and 
B themselves. It is possible that they 
are both the successively emerging con- 
sequences of a previous cause. The ideal 
causal concept goes a step farther and 
sees in the phenomenon, which we call the 
consequence, the continuation of that phe- 
nomenon which we call the cause, or its 
equivalent in a new form. The ideal causal 
concept consequently passes over into the 
concept of development or evolution; it is, 
therefore, no wonder that the latter has 
played a role in recent science only second 
to the concept of causality. 



The Problem of Knowledge 67 



All three kinds of understanding rest 
upon certain axioms or principles. Un- 
conscious thought — as it is exercised by 
the practical intelligence in the special 
sciences, in philosophical speculation, and 
in religious theory — does not feel impelled 
to undertake the investigation of these 
axioms, but the theory of knowledge over- 
hauls them for a critical examination. The 
theory of knowledge arises when we ask, in 
what does the validity or truth of our under- 
standing consist, and how far does it extend ? 
Here again arises the problem of the relation 
between continuity and discontinuity. The 
problem arose, for Plato, through the irra- 
tional relation between idea and phenomenon ; 
for moderns, through the irrational relation 
between formal science and real or natural 
science, science of fact. Can the concept 
ever be an adequate expression for the mani- 
foldness of phenomena, or the law for their 
changing combinations? 



68 Philosophical Problems 

For Plato, the solution lay in the theory 
that the ideas must have come down to man 
from a higher existence, and here, under the 
influence of the incomplete imitation pre- 
sented by the perceptual world, must reveal 
themselves to thought in their completeness. 
In modern times, the idea of the conformity 
of nature to law has often been considered 
as an a priori truth, as an original intuition, 
which at most only had to thank experience 
for being the occasion of calling it forth. 
The incommensurability between the prin- 
ciples (the logical principles and the prin- 
ciple of causality) on the one hand, and 
experience on the other, has begotten this 
speculative theory of knowledge. This 
incommensurability has given birth to what 
one might call the arbitrary theory, because 
it so strongly emphasizes the arbitrariness 
of our original formulation of the principles, 
and not less strongly emphasizes the fact 
that in their pure form they can obtain 
no confirmation through experience, — that 
they can never become results, but only 



The Problem of Knowledge 69 

remain mere postulates. Hobbes, the most 
pronounced champion of this view, says 
there can be no science of the principles of 
all science; that these principles are made 
by constructive art (principia sunt artis sive 
constructions, non autem scientiae et de- 
monstrationist and we ourselves create their 
truth (rationis prima principia vera esse faci- 
mus nosmet ipsi). According to Fichte the 
primary and unconditioned basis of all 
human cognition is obtained by means of 
a free construction; our science is based 
not upon a fact but upon an act; that is, 
upon the determination of the thinking 
consciousness always to keep in agreement 
with itself: upon the holding to the prin- 
ciple of identity. S. Kierkegaard makes a 
similar abrupt start in his establishment of 
the principles; and Kroman derives the 
principle of identity from the law of self- 
preservation, which seeks to hold the unity 
of consciousness intact; "by no means 
has it (the principle of identity) proceeded 
from experience." 29 



70 Philosophical Problems 

Hence the speculative and the arbitrary 
theories both alike acknowledge that there 
must be definite empirical occasions to 
call forth the intuitions or the postulates. 
Empiricism (which passes over into Evolu- 
tionism if it takes account of the experi- 
ences not only of the individual, but also 
of the species), when it appears in its abso- 
lute form, lays chief emphasis upon these 
'occasions' and treats them as complete 
causes. It has been set forth most lucidly 
by J. S. Mill and Herbert Spencer. It 
seeks to show how, under the long-continued 
influence of environment, general principles 
could gradually arise in consciousness; and 
it energetically asserts that no principle 
can possess validity beyond the empirical 
verifications which it may have won. There- 
fore, the principles have value only as results. 

What empiricism cannot explain is the 
fact that the principles themselves beget expe- 
riences for us through the questions to which 
they incite. More auspicious here is a fourth 
theory, which has recently been developed 



The Problem of Knowledge 71 

by Ernst Mach and Richard Avenarius, and 
which may be termed the economic theory. 
It concedes the rights both of passive ex- 
perience and of the active development of 
thought, since it considers the principles as 
'conceptual reactions' intended to win a 
view and comprehension of things by the 
shortest possible route. The reason why 
the principle of continuity plays such a 
leading role is said to lie in the fact that 
it is so economical a principle. The doubt 
is only as to the extent of its application. 
A man creates whatever concepts and prin- 
ciples he may need in order to make himself 
master of phenomena. Every practical and 
intellectual necessity is satisfied, if our 
thoughts are able completely to remind us 
of the facts of sense. This reminding is the 
goal and purpose of physics; and atoms, 
forces, and laws are only the means to facili- 
tate it. They are of value only in so far as 
they help us. 30 Maxwell and Hertz express 
themselves in similar fashion. 31 
The four theories, which conceive the 



72 Philosophical Problems 

principles of knowledge respectively as 
intuitions, as postulates, as generalizations, 
and as economic tools of thought, collec- 
tively presuppose the analytic or regressive 
theory of knowledge especially developed 
by Kant. For, what the object of the 
intuition or of the postulate or of the gener- 
alization may be, and what corresponds to 
the economic demand of the investigation, 
can only be discovered by the fact that 
one makes deductions backward from the 
data presented by experience, and finds 
the presuppositions on which an under- 
standing of them is based. Such an analysis 
must form the basis of every theory of knowl- 
edge. But one will never be able to feel 
entirely, sure that the analysis is complete. 
The history of science shows that this is 
a task which must constantly be under- 
taken afresh. At one time more, at another 
time fewer, principles than theretofore are 
thought to be necessary. A guaranty that 
absolutely the last presupposition has been 
reached can never be won. What the eco- 



The Problem of Knowledge 73 

nomic theory (on which I will particularly 
dwell) especially emphasizes is, first, that 
no more principles need to be posited than 
the given case in strict necessity demands 
(this is the thought of Avenarius's Kritik der 
reinen Erjahrung); secondly, that differ- 
ent principles may be necessary at different 
times or in different scientific situations, so 
that a principle that has for a long time 
furthered investigation, may later come to be 
recognized as inadmissible, without its his- 
torical significance being thereby ignored. 
The economic theory also emphasizes the law 
of parsimony and the character of the princi- 
ples as determined by purpose and utility. 
It owes its being to two classes of motives : 
first, to the desire to reduce to a minimum 
the principles that cannot be proved, 
— that is, from an anti-dogmatic or anti- 
metaphysical motive ; and secondly, it arises 
from experiences in the history of science 
which show how principles and hypotheses 
may for a certain period be valid and 
fruitful, but later must be displaced by 



74 Philosophical Problems 

others. The discussions carried on of late 
as to the validity of the mechanical concep- 
tion of nature have directed attention to this 
second class of motives. 

There are meanwhile two sides of the case 
which the special form assumed by the ana- 
lytic theory of knowledge, in its appearance 
as the economic theory, inadequately empha- 
sizes; and these become of special signifi- 
cance when the theory of knowledge is not 
considered as isolated, but is connected with 
other philosophical problems. 

In the first place, those forms through 
which our intellectual demands are satisfied 
must be in keeping with the general nature 
of consciousness. What we understand, 
and that we understand anything, depends 
not only on the constitution of phenomena, 
but also on our intellectual organization, 
just as the colors which we see depend as 
much on the constitution of our visual 
organs as on the external objects. There 
is a certain type for all principles and 
hypotheses, which finally refers back to 



The Problem of Knowledge 75 

the innermost nature of consciousness, and 
here, once more, one comes back to the 
necessity of unity and continuity. What 
and how many fundamental concepts (cate- 
gories) and presuppositions should be pos- 
tulated, — this is the problem that must ever 
anew be attacked in the battle of knowledge, 
if the standard is to be carried forward. 
Kant was suffering from an illusion if he 
supposed that one could once for all specify 
what would be necessary in this or that 
relation; but the old Master was not mis- 
taken in declaring that the demand for 
unity and continuity lies at the bottom of 
all the forms through which we win or ex- 
pect to win understanding. He himself has 
shown that all his categories can be traced 
back to the concept of continuity; and 
amid all the changes in the realm of prin- 
ciples this concept will undoubtedly be 
brought into play again and again. Logical 
principles, the principle of causality, and 
the fundamental doctrines of natural science, 
all hinge on this concept, which stands in 



76 Philosophical Problems 

such close connection with the nature of 
consciousness. A purely psychological epis- 
temology will never be able to afford satis- 
faction; because the fact that the demand 
for union and continuity — however essential 
it may be for consciousness — is satisfied 
by certain principles by no means implies 
that these are objectively valid. That 
demand may attain peace and satisfaction 
in many ways and under many forms, — 
as the history of mythology and of specula- 
tion sufficiently demonstrates, — ways and 
forms which as a rule entirely fail to satisfy 
the demands of economy, either with respect 
to parsimony or with respect to practicality. 
Schiller's words aptly express it: "Wide 
is the mind and narrow is the world. " In 
the whole kingdom of thoughts of which the 
human mind disposes, there is only a strait 
and compact series that are of any use 
when it comes to valid understanding. The 
only necessary requirement is, that the as- 
sumptions which the understanding of the 
datum calls for shall be psychologically pos- 



The Problem of Knowledge 77 

sible; that they shall be in harmony with 
the general laws of conscious life, and only 
special and detailed developments of what 
lies in those laws. Out of the thoughts in- 
voluntarily surging forth there must be a 
selection made, but this does not release 
us from conformity to general psychologi- 
cal laws. 

Thus it comes to pass that a new disposi- 
tion of a special kind is formed, — that an 
intellectual habit arises, which puts questions 
and criticises answers in a stricter, more 
definite way than is required by the in- 
voluntary course of thought. Every com- 
prehensive principle — psychologically con- 
sidered — is essentially the expression of such 
a habit, which may be more or less deeply 
imbedded in the nature of consciousness, i.e. 
which sometimes has the nature of an in- 
stinct, but sometimes seems more like the 
influence of custom. The purely logical 
principles approach most closely to the in- 
stinctive. The necessity of agreement with 
one's self, of the sequence of the train of 



78 Philosophical Problems 

ideas, is not to be explained by parsimony 
and fitness alone. When strict induction 
from previous experiences leads to contra- 
dictory results, we prefer to assume that the 
experiences are incomplete rather than that 
Being contradicts itself. 

What is in the highest degree true of the 
pure logical principles, is also true of the 
more special ones. Thus the principle of 
causality is an expression of our inclination, 
on the occurrence of one event, to look 
round for other events, in which the condi- 
tions for the occurrence of the first may 
be found. Here also appears our craving 
to win for the content of consciousness 
union and connection. The more special 
and definite the satisfaction of this craving 
is, the more powerfully the principle of 
economy operates in its two forms: as 
parsimony, which follows the short road 
to the goal; and as effectiveness, which 
takes the road that really leads to under- 
standing. As examples, we have Kepler's 
and Newton's demand for a vera causa. 



The Problem of Knowledge 79 

we have the law of inertia and the law 
of energy, etc. What appears as an hy- 
pothesis from the purely empirical view, 
becomes, epistemologically considered, a 
principle, a regulative thought, under whose 
leadership consciousness may satisfy in the 
empirical world its demand for continuity 
and union. 

In the second place, principles and fun- 
damental hypotheses need not be conceived 
as altogether fortuitous or arbitrary; even 
though they should be ultimately but work- 
ing hypotheses in the service of our intellec- 
tual economy, rather than literal parts of the 
Being that we wish by their aid to under- 
stand. The idea of a working hypothesis 
points in two directions : on the one hand, 
as already demonstrated, back to the nature 
of the thinking consciousness, since our con- 
sciousness can perform no function, however 
economical, which is entirely foreign to its 
own nature; on the other, to the reality 
to which the phenomena to be understood 
belong. A tool must be adapted both to 



80 Philosophical Problems 

the hand that is to use it and to the object 
to be worked on. The thing, therefore, must 
in itself present aspects which correspond 
to the formal tendencies of our knowledge, 
however much these latter may also be 
conditioned by the circumstances under 
which, or perhaps by means of which, the 
knowledge works. This is the case with all 
valid knowledge, from its most elementary 
to its highest forms. So it holds with 
sensations, in spite of their 'subjectivity,' 
and it holds with the highest principles of 
abstract unified thought. Kant remarked, 
on the inclination to presuppose a unity be- 
hind the diversities of natural phenomena : 32 
"One may perhaps believe that this is 
merely an economical tool of Reason in order 
to save one's self as much trouble as possi- 
ble, — an hypothetical attempt which, if 
successful, would borrow an air of probability 
from just this unity. But such a selfish view 
can very readily be distinguished from the 
fact that every one believes in, that this 
unity of Reason is congruent with Nature 



The Problem of Knowledge 81 

herself, and that Reason here does not beg 
but commands, although unable to deter- 
mine the limits of the unity which she as- 
sumes." So I would here add: wherever 
reason "commands" (or asks, expects, an- 
ticipates, postulates), she is, like all com- 
manders, under the necessity of shaping her 
commands according to the capacity of the 
obeyer that she may have to deal with. 

This last consideration leads to the ques- 
tion of the connection between the problem 
of knowledge on the one hand, and the prob- 
lem of Being on the other. It is especially 
necessary to bring this into prominence 
because the analytic theory of knowledge — 
like the economic and, in its way, the arbi- 
trary also — tends to set up a new concept 
of truth in place of our ordinary, naive 
concept. The significance of principles is, 
that they may lead us to reach a rational 
understanding in our work. Their truth 
consists in their valid application ; and this 
consists in their working value. That a 
principle is true, signifies that one can work 



82 Philosophical Problems 

with it, and this means, if the remark refer 
to the principles of knowledge, that one can 
with their help advance to understanding, 
— firmly ordering and unifying the phe- 
nomena. The concept of truth is a dynamic 
concept, since it expresses in a definite fash- 
ion the application of mental energy; and 
it is a symbolical concept, since it indicates, 
not outward likeness or qualitative similarity 
to an absolute object, but relative similarity 
(analogy) between the things in being and 
in human thought. The old naive concept 
of truth, according to which a cognition 
was true if it absolutely reproduced or 
mirrored 'reality,' is untenable, and it 
became so from the very moment when 
the subjectivity of sense-qualities began to 
be asserted. The subjectivity of sense- 
qualities, however, does not mean that 
they are invalid and unfit to guide us in the 
world. They stand constantly as tokens, 
signals, symbols, whose serial order we 
can point to as the expression of an objec- 
tive series of events, although we cannot 



The Problem of Knowledge 83 

demonstrate that they are copies of the 
objective series. The same relation ob- 
tains with logical principles and other 
fundamental presuppositions of our knowl- 
edge. The critical philosophy led to the 
result — a simple consequence of its analytic 
methods — that the truth of fundamental 
principles can only mean that they make 
intelligible experience possible; that they 
have, in fact, been found by analysis to be 
the necessary presuppositions of such ex- 
perience. A comparison of our thoughts 
with an absolute world of things is impos- 
sible; we can only compare thoughts and 
experiences. Kant himself did not see this 
consequence as clearly as some of his dis- 
ciples (Maimon and Fries) 33 ; the master 
himself was still hemmed in by dogma- 
tism, as can be seen in his doctrine of the 
* thing- in-itself as an absolute entity out- 
side of every subject. But when he desig- 
nates the law of causality as an 'analogy 
of experience,' and thereby understands 
that temporal events stand related in a way 



84 Philosophical Problems 

analogous to ground and consequence in our 
thought, then he is on the point of making 
it into a working hypothesis. In modern 
times, as we shall soon see, there is more 
inclination on the side of natural science 
to recognize the dynamic and symbolic 
concept of truth than was the case so long 
as the mechanical conception of nature bore 
a certain dogmatic character. This new 
conception of truth, which works itself out in 
the realm of science, exhibits resemblances 
to the religious consciousness — as we shall 
see under the fourth main problem — in that 
it always sets itself in opposition to dogmas. 
In the religious realm, also, men are tend- 
ing more and more to ask for its prac- 
ticality and working value. The static 
notion of truth 3 * must everywhere give way 
to the dynamic. 

Even after fruitful principles or working 
hypotheses have been attained, will Being 
be completely rendered by them? or will 
there always remain an irrational relation 
between the principles which may compose 



The Problem of Knowledge 85 

our consciousness and the Being itself from 
which our experiences are derived? We 
shall find that under three different forms 
there is always an irrational remainder, viz. 
in the relation of quality to quantity, in 
the significance which the time-relation has 
for the causal concept, and in the relation 
between subject and object. Let us now 
consider each of these three points by itself. 

3 

In the attempt to reduce all given dif- 
ferences to identity and continuity, the es- 
pecially characteristic thing was the effort 
to trace back differences of kind to differ- 
ences of degree. In the science of material 
nature, this manifests itself as the attempt 
to explain all changes as motion in space. 
Motion from one place to another is the 
simplest change : it would therefore indicate 
a great advance toward clearness, if it could 
be shown that this is a kind of change 
which under different forms goes on 
in Nature wherever immediate experience 



86 Philosophical Problems 

shows us qualitative changes. Long ago 
Aristotle taught that spatial motion lay at 
the bottom of all other changes, of all 
becoming and disappearing. He, however, 
held it impossible — as the atomists would 
have it — to derive all events in material 
nature from motions. Only after the upris- 
ing of modern science does this idea make 
its appearance in earnest. Galileo stands as 
the great founder of what we are accustomed 
to call (in the narrow sense) the mechanical 
view of nature. Besides the simplicity 
hereby attained — and Galileo was firmly 
convinced that nature strikes out the sim- 
plest path — the conclusion was also reached 
that we could operate with determinate 
quantities. Hence Galileo said: measure 
everything that is measurable and make 
measurable what is not! By this reduc- 
tion, on the one hand, unity becomes possi- 
ble, for qualitative differences can only be 
appreciated, not measured ; and on the other 
hand, exact verification becomes possible. 35 
The principles which serve as the basis of 



The Problem of Knowledge 87 

the mechanical conception of nature were 
regarded by its weightiest champions as 
absolute truths, as fundamental laws of 
Being. In so far as they nevertheless be- 
lieved that these principles needed a basis, 
they drew them directly out of the being 
and will of God. Herein were Cartesians 
and Newtonians at one; and the material- 
ists parted with them only because they 
held the theological basis to be superfluous 
and impossible. By a series of magnificent 
discoveries and explanations this general 
view of nature has demonstrated its fertility. 
For us, the question is, Can it be considered 
a finality from the epistemological point of 
view? 

Now, even if we should assume that every- 
thing in material Nature can be explained 
by the principles of the mechanical philoso- 
phy (and this, as we shall soon see, has 
recently been doubted in scientific circles), 
it is in the first place clear that qualities are 
not driven out of the world because they 
are 'reduced' to quantities, or because they 



88 Philosophical Problems 

are attributed to the sensationally perceiving 
subject. They remain as immediate facts 
to be empirically recognized. The proper- 
ties of a chemical product cannot be derived 
from the properties of its elements ; and if 
one kind of psychical energy conserves its 
equivalent in another kind of psychical en- 
ergy, yet the equivalent has new properties 
which cannot be derived from the properties 
of the first form of energy. But one cannot 
make the sensationally perceiving subject 
create these qualities out of nothing; in any 
case, we should then raise insoluble psycho- 
logical difficulties, as bad as any of the 
physical and chemical difficulties which we 
were trying to get rid of. 

In the second place, extension and motion 
are, in the last analysis, themselves qualities ; 
actual properties which in themselves might 
call for an explanation just as much as 
the so-called special sense-qualities. Since 
Berkeley's and Leibniz's time this has 
often been asserted on the philosophic side. 
There are no grounds to suppose that their 



The Problem of Knowledge 89 

quantitative properties express the inner- 
most essence of things. The reason why- 
science seeks these out so fondly and lingers 
by them is really only because with their 
help one can give exact descriptions of mate- 
rial phenomena, and from them can draw 
definite conclusions. This doctrine has re- 
cently been strongly championed by investi- 
gators like Maxwell and Hertz, 36 by the 
latter as an explicit addition to the above- 
mentioned economic theory of knowledge. 
"The advance of the exact sciences," says 
Maxwell, "rests on the discovery and devel- 
opment of appropriate and exact ideas, by 
means of which we can form a mental rep- 
resentation of the facts which shall be suffi- 
ciently comprehensive to stand for every 
individual case, but at the same time suffi- 
ciently exact to warrant the conclusions 
which by means of mathematical calcula- 
tions we draw from them. " And according 
to Hertz ('Principles of Mechanics,' Intro- 
duction), in order to be able to derive the 
future from the past, we create images or 



90 Philosophical Problems 

symbols of such a kind that the effects de- 
ducible from the images by thought shall 
also be images of the effects that follow in 
the course of Nature from the imaged ob- 
jects. The dynamic and symbolic notion 
of truth is here expressly put in the place 
of the naif dogmatic concept to which the 
mechanical conception of nature formerly 
swore fealty. The problem reduces itself 
to finding a group of symbols which can be 
employed with entire consistency, and from 
which conclusions can be drawn that will 
be confirmed by new experiences which can 
themselves be again expressed by the same 
group of symbols. But by this method we 
never get rid of the possibility that an- 
other set of symbols might have expressed 
the actual experiences as well or better, 
and furnished equally verifiable deductions. 
It can never be proved of any set of sym- 
bols that it is the only right and necessary 
and possible set. 

The epistemological reflections to which 
recent investigators have thus been led have 



The Problem of Knowledge 91 

arisen from the difficulty either of subsum- 
ing electrical phenomena under the me- 
chanical conception of nature, or of deriving 
the principles of the latter from the laws 
of electrical phenomena. The latter possi- 
bility has been defended recently by Hertz, 
the earlier one by Boltzmann. 37 Of the 
greatest interest, therefore, to epistemology 
is Maxwell's criticism of the ordinary no- 
tion of matter, according to which matter 
is considered to be an extended mass. Ac- 
cording to Maxwell, the weakness of this 
concept is that it tends to think of matter as 
inert. But it is motion which makes rest 
intelligible, not the reverse. The doctrine 
of motion must therefore precede the doc- 
trine of equilibrium ; dynamics must precede 
statics. From motion we attain the notion 
of force or energy, by means of which 
equilibrium becomes intelligible. But if 
we understand by matter the constant, the 
unchanged amid all changes, this can only 
be the law-element in motion, and thus the 
essence of 'matter' will consist in motion. 



92 Philosophical Problems 

Further, it is, according to Maxwell, a 
prejudice to regard matter as extended 
and molecules as hard — for then we must 
ask what holds the parts of the molecules 
together, and come to molecules of the 
second degree. But we must constantly 
operate with geometrical as well as with 
dynamic concepts, whether we consider the 
last elements as really extended or not. It 
is only as a passive property that extension 
is attacked by Maxwell; thus if I draw a 
line on the table, the motion is the essential 
thing in the line. 38 Here there comes to 
the surface an epistemological point of view 
of extreme importance: static conditions 
always contain problems which can only be 
solved by substituting motion for rest. Po- 
tential energy is understood only through 
actual energy, capacities and tendencies only 
through their results. This law holds every- 
where, in the psychical as well as in the 
physical sphere. There is a half-mystical, 
half- materialistic inclination to find perfec- 
tion in contemplating — or gazing at — some- 



The Problem of Knowledge 93 

thing unchanging. 89 Maxwell has made an 
important contribution toward eradicating 
this inclination. But the great question is, 
whether the idea of the continuity of motion 
or activity can be carried into all spheres. 
Even if the dynamic asserts its epistemo- 
logical priority over the static, the static 
cannot be got rid of as a fact; it always 
springs up again before us with its problems 
for thought, and Maxwell himself recognized 
this in maintaining that geometrical as well 
as dynamic concepts are indispensable to the 
explanation of nature. In contrast to the dy- 
namic, the geometric denotes simultaneity. 
In the realm of material nature, simultaneity 
appears in the form of space 40 ; in the psy- 
chical realm, the relation of simultaneity 
does not take on this geometric form, but 
appears as a 'static' element, which sets 
new tasks for the inquirer after he has by 
dint of hard work found the laws of psy- 
chical change. After the continuity of 
developmental processes has been demon- 
strated, it must be proved that there is 



94 Philosophical Problems 

continuity between the processes and the 
static conditions. Here again we run 
upon the standing problem; this would 
present itself, even if qualities had found 
complete explanation by means of their 
representation by quantities; or even if the 
physical axioms, with which science works, 
were not merely the most complete and 
appropriate set of symbols which have yet 
been formulated and employed, but were 
something more. The possibility of an irra- 
tional relation between Being and our knowl- 
edge can therefore not be ruled out of court. 

4 

The investigation of the relation between 
the elementary, or empirical, and the ideal 
concept oj causality will lead to a similar 
result. In its elementary form, the notion 
of causation means, as we saw, only such a 
relation between two effects that, after one 
has appeared, the other also inevitably ap- 
pears. But from this idea of inevitable 
sequence, investigation proceeds by observa- 



The Problem of Knowledge 95 

tion, tests, and hypotheses to demonstrate 
as far as possible such a continuity in the 
series of effects that the differences between 
the members of the series are diminished, 
until finally even the difference in time is 
reduced to a minimum. From an external, 
although inevitable sequence, thought thus 
works down through continuity to complete 
identity of cause and effect. Although the 
time-relation plays an essential role in the 
elementary law of causation, it is almost 
entirely eliminated in the ideal concept of 
causality. If this process could be applied 
throughout, we should reach the paradoxical 
result that the complete explanation of cau- 
sality involves the very abolition of the causal 
concept : for the causal relation is only dif- 
ferentiated from the purely logical relation 
of identity between cause and effect by the 
temporal difference between the terms. 

The philosophy of the seventeenth century 
(Spinoza and Leibniz) made no distinction 
between cause (causa) and reason (ratio); 
the causal relation between two phenomena 



96 Philosophical Problems 

was to them the same as the relation between 
the premises and conclusion of a syllogism, 
only a relation of identity. It appeared to 
them self-evident that in the effect no more 
could be contained than in the cause; that 
the time-relation between the members was 
a matter of indifference, and that time was 
anyhow only at home in the dim sphere 
of ideas and imagination. In Hume's 
handling of the problem of causality, this 
is also involved, since he declared that 
there was nothing to warrant the inference 
from past to future. According to Hume, 
the experiences of the past could only show 
that a thing once, at a single moment, pos- 
sessed a certain potentiality, but not that 
it always possesses or will possess it. 41 
Kant, to be sure, believed a rational proof 
could be given for the validity of the doc- 
trine of causality; but he said that the 
causal relation and the relation between 
reason and consequence were only anal- 
ogous, not identical, the causal relation 
signifying to him that events follow one 



The Problem of Knowledge 97 

another analogously to the way in which 
the conclusion springs from the premises. 
The causal relation would thus contain a 
rule by which we could attain unity in 
our experiences. 42 

In recent times, the attempt has been 
made from two different bases to eliminate 
the time- relation ; and consequently, to cast 
overboard not only the elementary causal 
concept, but ultimately the whole causal 
concept. 

From the ' speculative ' quarter it has been 
asserted that the time-relation always in- 
dicates an imperfection, an incomplete stage 
of development. So long as the time-rela- 
tion determines our conception of being, our 
conception is on that very account incom- 
plete, and the reality of the time- relation 
is irreconcilable with the idea of complete 
knowledge, of absolute truth. Our knowl- 
edge always works away from the time- 
relation; the more clearly we understand 
anything, the less significance does the time 
distinction have, — the more does knowl- 



98 Philosophical Problems 

edge of mere fact pass over into formal 
knowledge, that of causes into that of rea- 
sons. What at first we called cause and 
effect will with the advance of knowledge 
appear as members of a totality, as mem- 
bers which stand in a fixed relation to 
one another, in a rational relation to which 
temporal sequence is unessential. The fact 
that we became aware first of the one and 
then of the other member, has no significance ; 
in our recognition of the law the whole past 
appears to us as a unity. Not the time- rela- 
tion, but the unity behind the time- relation 
binds what we call the cause to what we call 
the effect. Moreover there exists no time 
interval between the end of the event, 
which we call cause, and the beginning of 
the event, which we call effect. The English 
philosophers Francis Bradley and Bernard 
Bosanquet 43 have given currency to this 
view, which is intimately connected with a 
speculative interest in the idea of totality, 
and in absolute conclusions. 

From an entirely different basis — which 



The Problem of Knowledge 99 

may be designated that of ' pure experience, ' 
and of which Richard Avenarius and Ernst 
Mach are the chief exponents — reasoning 
has worked in a similar direction, but from 
other motives. The attempt here is to cut 
away from the immediate datum all those 
associated ideas and auxiliary notions with 
which we involuntarily or methodically sup- 
plement our experience. The advance of 
knowledge consists in a reduction of differ- 
ences (to a 'heterotic minimum') and in 
an approximation to a pure description of 
a continuous process. During this advance, 
the content of knowledge becomes constantly 
more confined to descriptive statements, as 
far as possible with analytical transitions, 
and the distinctions are reduced from quali- 
tative to quantitative, as far as possible 
with the constant proof of equivalence. 
It is no longer the function of strict sci- 
ence to explain; whoever wishes ' expla- 
nations' is referred to mythology and 
metaphysics ; it is the aim of science to 
give an exact, methodical description of all 



100 Philosophical Problems 

relations and transitions. What specially 
concerns the causal relation, so this view 
asserts, is, first, that every employment 
of the concept of cause and effect cuts 
out two elements arbitrarily from the 
context in which they stand, and places 
them in antithesis; secondly, that the 
time- relation can readily be reversed as 
soon as one has demonstrated an equiva- 
lence or as soon as one ignores the direction 
in which the change takes place. 44 

The epistemological views which, by these 
methods, would from various motives seek 
to eliminate the elementary causal con- 
cept and combat the chief significance of 
the time- relation, can be characterized by 
saying that they set up an ideal knowl- 
edge instead of the real knowledge which 
we can at any given time attain. Every 
definite investigation must begin at a definite 
point, which lies where the problem itself 
crops out. The problem crops out when 
two of the members in a series of events draw 
attention to themselves, and arouse supposi- 



The Problem of Knowledge 101 

tions as to their inner connection, or when a 
single member appears alone or suddenly, 
and thereby gives rise to the necessity of 
finding intermediates by which it can be 
brought into connection with all the rest of 
the series. The point of departure seized 
upon is in so far fortuitous and arbitrary; 
but in the nature of the case it can be 
nothing else. Our knowledge develops his- 
torically, because the attention of men is 
only aroused under certain definite con- 
ditions. If attention were at all times 
directed indiscriminately with equal strength 
to all the members of the series of events, 
no knowledge at all would be possible. 
Naturally, it is of importance that one 
should be conscious of the fortuitous or 
subjective nature of the point of departure 
and of the bit of experience cut out, but 
with the advance of the process of knowl- 
edge, one gets beyond this, because the 
fragmentary experience is worked, by 
understanding, into a great continuous 
whole. 



102 Philosophical Problems 

This historical character of our knowledge 
is also evident when we recall how we al- 
ways stand between the experiences of the 
past and the possibilities of the future. At 
every instant we must distinguish between 
the present and the expected datum; that 
is the cause, this the effect, and the expecta- 
tion can never be more than an hypothesis. 
The single instant, in which on the one side 
stands a 'no more,' on the other side a 
'not yet/ presents the problem in its whole 
intensity, an intensity which only the numb- 
ing power of custom can lessen. The puz- 
zle will not be wanting with new problems — 
and so long as knowledge strides forward, 
it will seek and find new problems. 45 The 
full connection between events always ap- 
pears afterward, and until it appears, the 
assumption of it stands as an hypothesis. 
Concepts like force, energy, cause, or possi- 
bility (which with different shades of mean- 
ing express one and the same relation; 
namely, the dependence of later conditions 
on the preceding) will therefore never cease 



The Problem of Knowledge 103 

to be needed; this dependence is differen- 
tiated from the relation of purely logical 
and mathematical dependence by the fact 
that it is at once a temporal and a rational 
relation, because the resulting condition 
comes after as well as out 0} the preced- 
ing condition. Even if continuity should 
have been demonstrated by means of never 
so many intermediates and degrees of tran- 
sition, this time- relation would nevertheless 
remain valid for every little step between 
two of the graded members. 

No change would follow here even if 
equivalence had been proved between the 
separated states. Hume's problem has by 
no means been solved, as has sometimes 
been said, by the discovery of the conserva- 
tion of energy. An equivalential relation 
does not exclude a qualitative difference, 
but directly presupposes it: for example, 
I have no reason to set up the equation 
A=B, unless A and B appeared different 
before I found by closer examination that 
they could be substituted for one another. 



104 Philosophical Problems 

If such an equivalence has been found, it 
will make no difference whether we pass 
from A to B or from B to A ; but when we 
found it, we began with A or B and pro- 
ceeded by way of investigation to the other 
term. 

In a judgment, we must, therefore, dis- 
criminate between the psychological process 
through which the judgment arises — and 
in which there is a definite difference, be- 
tween the initial idea (the subject) and the 
concluding idea (the predicate) — and the 
finished judgment that can be formulated 
as a relation of identity, in which the 
difference between subject and predicate 
loses all significance. 46 But in external 
events, the order of members has the same 
significance that it has in the movement of 
thought. If I have recognized that there is 
an equivalence between heat and motion, 
it is, considered purely abstractly, a mat- 
ter of indifference whether I go from heat 
to motion or from motion to heat. But, in 
the real world, the ' direction of change' is 



The Problem of Knowledge 105 

a question of life and death. Being, in 
fact, grows different according as the pre- 
ponderant changes tend in this direction 
or in that. Time, therefore, cannot be 
reversed, and this proves that equivalence 
cannot be the end-all of our knowledge. 
Besides their equivalence, we must know the 
actual direction of the transformations of 
fact; and this knowledge can only be won 
from constantly new experience. 

And here we come upon the fact that 
every relation of equivalence, — as, in gen- 
eral, every causal relation — first becomes 
effective in fact when certain conditions, 
especially forces of release, are present. With 
respect to the presence of these conditions, 
there arises a new problem: Can one also 
show that these forces of detent stand to 
their own causes in a relation of equiva- 
lence? We light here upon an endless 
series, in which definite, concrete answers 
give out long before the questions do. 
We have here also a purely logical 
analogy; since every absolute relation of 



106 Philosophical Problems 

identity (A = B) of two concepts rests, on 
nearer inspection, upon definite conditions 
(so that according to Jevons's formula it 
might be expressed AC=BC 47 ), there arises 
the new question, how the identity is related 
to this condition (C) ; and so thought wan- 
ders on indefinitely. 

There is, then, no prospect of freeing 
ourselves from the historical elements of 
our knowledge. The measure of the de- 
velopment of our knowledge consists, first, 
in the extent to which the elementary notion 
of causation (inevitable succession) can be 
employed rather than the bare fact of 
occurrence of simultaneous or successive 
differences; and thereafter, in the extent to 
which this elementary notion can be re- 
placed by the ideal concept of causality 
(equivalence or identity). But the pro- 
cess of knowledge consists at all times in 
an ascent through the three stages here 
pointed out, — an ascending process that 
must always be repeated from each new 
starting-point. This necessity is conditioned 



The Problem of Knowledge 107 

by the reality of the time-relation. Hence, 
absolutistic conceptions — whether they ap- 
pear in idealistic or realistic form — always 
have a tendency to slight the time- relation 
or to consider it as only ' empirical,' if 
not illusory. 48 If the time-relation is an 
illusion, it is another illusion of the second 
potency if we imagine that we can lightly 
rid ourselves of it. For us, existence can 
never be absorbed into thought without 
remainder. 

5 

From yet a third point of view, the 
problem of knowledge reveals itself in all 
its severity, while at the same time a con- 
tinual development of knowledge appears to 
be possible. In every cognition we can dis- 
tinguish between a subjective and an objective 
element, between the knower and the thing 
known ; both terms, however, are only given 
in mutual relation, although within the rela- 
tion either may be the more prominent term. 

What part, then, of our knowledge is sub- 
jective and what objective? Already, from 



108 Philosophical Problems 

our discussion, it is evident that this ques- 
tion may be variously answered. In the 
domain of natural science, there is a ten- 
dency to credit all qualitative differences, 
everything that breaks continuity, and ul- 
timately, perhaps, everything that violates 
identity, to the Subject. Sense-qualities, 
space and time distinctions, are also only 
subjective. Arguments for this view may be 
found in the fact that the differences which 
we perceive in qualitative, extensive, in- 
tensive, and protensive (temporal) relations 
are due to our psychic dispositions. Our 
sensations are acts of discrimination whose 
results depend upon the organization and 
previous history of the feeling Subject. 
The differences discovered have value only 
in relation to the point of view of the Sub- 
ject in his different relations. To this must 
be added the discontinuity of our attention, 
which moves by jerks, now toward, now 
away from, its object; and from this also 
arise differences and interruptions which 
cannot be attributed to the object. 



The Problem of Knowledge 109 

The dogmatic and speculative school 
of philosophy and of natural science has 
been inclined to follow this line of thought. 
The emancipation from the merely subjec- 
tive here would lead immediately towards 
continuity and identity as the essence and 
norm of truth. 

The critical philosophy asserts in re- 
buttal that the qualitative, extensive, inten- 
sive, and protensive differences form the 
material given to our knowledge and set 
the tasks of our investigation. As our 
personality endeavors to weld together its 
sporadic elements, to harmonize conflicting 
tendencies, and to free itself from obscurity 
and self-contradiction, so our understand- 
ing endeavors to transmute the differences 
actually given to us into stages of one 
and the same continuous developmental 
process, or into forms of one and the 
same content. The demand for continuity 
and identity lies in the depths of human 
consciousness; and man seeks, therefore, 
to find them again in the content given to 



110 Philosophical Problems 

knowledge. Furthermore, consciousness it- 
self cannot give rise to the differences 
which form the material for it to work on, 
no matter how much the shape and degree 
with which they appear in consciousness may 
have been determined by its involuntarily 
operating conditions. In the most recent 
discussions of the epistemological basis of 
natural science, there is a tendency to 
derive all unifying simplifications mainly 
from the economy of the knowing Subject. 
In reality, we nowhere and at no time 
possess the pure Subject, with its forms, as 
an antithesis to a pure object, or rather 
' thing-in-itself , ' from which the plural- 
ity of the content of knowledge comes. 
Kant decided this point prematurely in 
thinking that the subjective forms of knowl- 
edge could be determined once for all so 
that the 'matter' of knowledge would be 
left to come from the ' thing-in-itself. ' But 
in the special development of his episte- 
mology he could not avoid asking whence 
the forms sprang, or pointing out that they 



The Problem of Knowledge 111 

too are determined ultimately by the 
' thing-in-itself , ' since the forms no less than 
the 'matter' are given and must be ascer- 
tained through psychological analysis. And 
since the ' forms ' designate the more constant 
element of our knowledge, the underlying pre- 
supposition of Kant's philosophy turns out 
to be something that he could not claim to 
verify, namely that the 'thing-in-itself works 
uniformly — for forms otherwise could not 
exist, or at any rate could not be applied. 49 
Kant, consequently, hesitated between the 
two views above described, although it was 
evidently his intention to cling to the latter. 
Continuity was for him the general basal 
form of the categories, and synthesis the 
fundamental law of action of the know- 
ing consciousness. 

The problem is more complicated than 
Kant saw it. If we distinguish in our knowl- 
edge between Subject and Object, we really 
set up an objectively determined Subject (S ) 
as the reverse of a subjectively determined 
Object (Os). The properties or 'forms,' 



112 Philosophical Problems 

which we attribute to the Subject, cannot 
be explained from the concept of the Sub- 
ject itself (the pure S); they are there as 
objective facts, quite as much as the other 
properties with which our knowledge has 
to do. In like manner, the properties or 
determinations which we attribute to the 
Object always belong to it only in relation 
to a Subject, and indeed, upon closer con- 
sideration, to a Subject of a certain peculiar 
constitution. Hence the problem always 
repeats itself: Whence does the Subject get 
its objective content from? and what rela- 
tion obtains between the subjective deter- 
minations (qualities, etc.) of the Object and 
its proper essence, as Subjects of a different 
nature from ourselves would apprehend it? 
Here, again, we run up against the irra- 
tional, and here perhaps we see most clearly 
how inexhaustible Being is in comparison 
with our knowledge. The justification of 
Kant's setting up the notion of the 'thing-in- 
itself lay in the fact that a transcendent 
concept is needed in order to express the 



The Problem of Knowledge 113 

irrational relation between what he called 
the 'form' and the 'matter' of our knowl- 
edge. Yet if we wish to hold to the notion 
of the 'thing-in- itself,' we can use it in the 
spirit of Kant and still avoid the contra- 
dictions which cling to it in Kant's phi- 
losophy. We can do this by employing it 
to express the fact that the difference 
between Subject and Object always springs 
up anew whenever we think we have found 
an objective explanation of the character 
of the Subject or a subjective explanation 
of the character of the Object. Each re- 
fers to the other indefinitely, and the irra- 
tional crops out in the fact that an infinite 
series (of the type : S x \ O x \ S 2 \ 2 ---) is both 
possible and necessary. Thought must con- 
stantly be set to work afresh to find predicates 
for the determination of being, because the 
springs which feed the stream of thought are 
inexhaustible. The 'thing-in-itself is the 
vague starting-point of thought, which 
ever and anon reappears in new form and 
calls for new determination. 50 It mav be 



114 PhilosopUcal Problems 

that the true symbol for the relation of 
our knowledge to Being should not be an 
irrational but an imaginary number, since 
being may possess attributes that cannot 
be comprehended or defined by means of 
the dimensions in which our thoughts can 
move. That this may be possible can in 
any case no more be contradicted than the 
possibility that being may be rational only 
in a very narrow sphere, and that it might 
some day turn toward us another side, 
about which we could build no structure of 
connected and practical thought. Then, as 
I have elsewhere shown, 51 a logical ice-age 
would set in for us. The relation between 
Subject and Object would not arise at all; 
there could be neither an So nor an O s . 

In an earlier connection I made use of 
Schiller's words: "Wide is the brain and 
narrow is the world;" and now the sen- 
tence can be reversed: "Wide is the world, 
and narrow is the brain ! " Knowledge, how- 
ever rich and powerful it may be, is after 
all only a part of Being; and the problem 



The Problem of Knowledge 115 

of knowledge would be soluble, only if Being 
as a totality (in so far as we can conceive it 
as such a totality) could be expressed by 
means of a single one of its parts. In any 
event, our expression must always remain 
symbolic ; even when our knowledge reaches 
its climax, it gives us only an extract from a 
more inclusive whole. Among all the possi- 
bilities of thought, only a single one appears 
in the reality recognized by us. The reality 
which we recognize is, however, only a part 
of a greater whole, — and here we are not 
in a position to determine the relation be- 
tween the parts and the whole. An exhaus- 
tive concept of reality is not given us to 
create. 




CHAPTER III 
THE PROBLEM OF BEING 



[HE problem of consciousness and 
the problem of knowledge both 
point beyond themselves: con- 
sciousness is a part of Being, and 
it is the task of knowledge to understand 
Being. Here arise quite naturally the ques- 
tions, what place consciousness holds in 
Being, and what picture of Being knowledge 
can give us. The problem to which we are 
thus introduced may be called the cos- 
mological one, being the problem as to how 
far a final world-view is possible. Cosmos 
means Being considered as a totality, and 
logos means doctrine, or view. It would also 
be proper to use here the word ' metaphysic, ' 
although it has been used in a great many 

different senses and is thus less exact. 
116 



The Problem of Being 117 

The cardinal difficulty of this problem 
lies in the fact that the cosmological prin- 
ciples — the principles which should underlie 
our view of the world — cannot be simply 
drawn from some particular empirical realm, 
for the whole undertaking is to unite all 
empirical realms into a totality and to give 
that totality a positive character. 

Any attempt to treat the problem of Being 
must bear a formal as well as a real character. 
On the one hand, it must be asked what 
demands are to be made on the concept which 
assumes to be able to comprehend Being in 
its totality, and whether it is possible to 
satisfy these demands ; on the other hand, it 
must be asked, what positive characters of 
such a totality can be specified, so far as we 
are able to conceive it. 

The formal motives of speculation as to 
the nature of Being lie deep in the constitu- 
tion of consciousness and knowledge. They 
are connected with the demand for continu- 
ity, a demand in which both personality 
and science coincide. The nature of thought 



118 Philosophical Problems 

manifests itself at all stages and under all 
forms as a connection, a synthesis, and it is 
therefore not to be expected that thought 
will voluntarily give up the attempt to 
knit its sporadic data together. This effort 
has a peculiar and practical importance 
because firm and continuous connection is 
the only criterion that we have in doubtful 
cases, if it comes to a matter of distinguish- 
ing dreams or illusions from Reality. The 
more comprehensive and internally connected 
the concept of Reality we could form, the 
greater would be its trustworthiness. Hence, 
on both theoretical and practical grounds, 
there will be an inclination to go to the 
limit, to seek out the continuation and the 
conclusion toward which theoretic and prac- 
tical explanations already tend. The ideal 
would be reached if we could establish a 
complete harmonization of all our experi- 
ences — a continuous totality, with which 
all particular empirical realms, each ac- 
cording to its own laws, would connect 
themselves. 



The Problem of Being 119 

But the discussion of the problem of 
knowledge must already have taught us 
that such a finished world- view is impossible 
and, to a certain degree, would be self- 
contradictory. None of the particular em- 
pirical fields lies before us all complete and 
closed; there are always new experiences 
and new riddles; our coordinating thought 
constantly has to undertake new tasks. 
Since our knowledge always works by means 
of combination and comparison, every total- 
ity — if it is to be the object of com- 
plete knowledge — must be held or placed 
alongside of something different from it- 
self: only thus can it be given complete 
determination; but if there were anything 
different from itself, it would not be a total- 
ity! It is a matter of indifference whether 
we hold fast to the first empirical totality 
which we attempt to construct, or whether 
we go back to the principle of such a totality 
and give to it the name ' God,' in contrast 
with the totality itself, the ' world ' — the 
antinomy is the same in both cases. 52 The 



120 Philosophical Problems 

irrational meets us here as it did in the 
problem of knowledge, and herein we find 
a certain inner connection between the two 
problems. The fact that knowledge is for- 
ever unfinished may perhaps be connected 
with the fact that Being itself is not ready- 
made, but still incomplete, and rather to be 
conceived as a continual becoming, like the 
individual personality and like knowledge. 
Perhaps Being also conceals simultaneous 
discords in itself, which make it impossible 
to construct an harmonious whole. If so, 
the analogy between the different problems 
would be peculiarly plain. In their dif- 
ferent systems of thought, the philosophers 
have been too sure that Being in itself was 
a closed and constant totality, and that it 
was only our wills and minds that had to 
battle incessantly to exist and to attain 
harmony. 

A practical motive of speculation springs 
from the prominent part which some one 
phenomenon, some one department of ex- 
perience or side of Being may assume for 



The Problem of Being 121 

us. The tendency may then arise to use 
this phenomenon or aspect as a basis for 
interpreting the meaning of all Being, and 
deriving the other phenomena from this, or 
tracing them back to this. The different 
cosmological systems are just so many at- 
tempts to sound the depths of Being, to 
test how wide a searchlight one thought 
can throw over the whole of it. They are 
a series of thought- experiments, by means 
of which the carrying power of our largest 
thoughts, their capacity to serve as the 
groundwork of a comprehensive world- 
view, has been tested. 

Every attempt of that sort necessarily 
makes use of analogy, as Leibniz first 
discerned with the clear eye of genius. In 
all science analogy may occupy a significant 
place. All designations of psychical phe- 
nomena have originally been formed on 
the basis of an analogy with physical 
phenomena, and in psychology we are con- 
stantly compelled to work with physical 
analogies. It, therefore, becomes an im- 



122 Philosophical Problems 

portant question, how far they are valid. 
According to Kant, the doctrine of causality 
expresses the idea that a relation exists be- 
tween the real data of the world, analogous 
to that between reason and consequence in 
our thought. The atomic theory and the 
so-called mechanical conceptions of Nature 
have very recently come to be considered 
as so many vast analogies, by means of 
which the qualitative changes of Nature 
can be described and calculated. Also, 
in discoveries, analogy is of great impor- 
tance. The analogy between chemistry 
and physics helped Robert Mayer to his 
discovery of the conservation of energy. 
But if analogy is employed metaphysically 
or cosmologicaliy, it is not a single realm 
of Being serving to illuminate another single 
realm; it is a single realm that is used 
to express Being as a totality. This sym- 
bolism is of a different kind and has different 
validity from that brought to bear between 
particular fields; it cannot be carried out 
to its full consequences, and it cannot be 



The Problem of Being 123 

verified. Neither the justification nor the 
limits of analogy can here be strictly shown. 
In these respects cosmological or metaphys- 
ical symbols are different from scientific 
ones. As I have attempted to show in my 
' Philosophy of Religion,' religious symbols 
share the fate of the metaphysical. In 
both cases the attempt is made to create 
absolutely valid final concepts; the only 
difference lies in the motive. 

In the problem of knowledge, likewise, 
we came upon an irrational relation between 
part and whole. There it was connected 
with the question how jar the whole could 
express itself through and in a single part. 
Here in the cosmological problem, the ques- 
tion is how jar determinations can be de- 
duced jrom a single part which are true 
oj the totality as such. It is one and 
the same question that meets in both 
problems, only from different directions. 

The character and value of a theory of 
the world depend not only on how clearly 
and logically the analogy is worked out, but 



124 Philosophical Problems 

also on where the analogy is drawn from. 
The phenomenon (the part or aspect of ex- 
perience) on which the analogy is based may 
be called the type- phenomenon (Urphano- 
men). We are indebted to Gothe for this 
expression. But Gothe understood by the 
word Urphdnomen not only a phenomenon 
of a typical kind that might serve to illu- 
minate other phenomena ; to him it signified 
a fact that is at the same time a law ; so that 
one only needs to mention it, in order to see 
through it; a fact, moreover, that need not 
be considered as composite, since, being it- 
self, as it were, the symbol of everything else, 
it sets bounds to our view, and stirs up not 
only deep wonder and awe, but also the 
feeling that we stand at the limit of our 
powers. 53 How unfortunate this concept 
was for Gothe's theory of colors, is well 
known. By the very definition itself he 
wanted to exclude every further examina- 
tion and explanation of the phenomenon 
chosen by him as type. But this defect 
need not of necessity cling to the type-phe- 



The Problem of Being 125 

nomenon. The term may well denote the 
point of our experience from which we at- 
tempt to take our bearings in all directions, 
but it may none the less remain an object 
of farther investigation and explanation. 
The chief point is whether the phenome- 
non chosen is so individual and significant 
that it can possess typical character for us. 
The interpretation of Being must always 
issue from a single place in experience, 
and it may so issue without exempting that 
place from special scientific treatment. 

But now where shall we look for the 
type-phenomenon? Around this point 
the battle of the different world-views 
revolves. Now lije, now thought, now 
matter is taken, and made the basis of 
the interpretation. Before proceeding to 
the consideration of the most important 
of the type-phenomena which cosmological 
interpretation has pressed into its service, 
let us linger a while over the interpreta- 
tion itself. 



126 Philosophical Problems 

2 

Metaphysics may become dogmatic and 
thereby work a twofold injury to science, 
— partly by thus cutting off every scien- 
tific explanation of the selected 'type- 
phenomenon, ' partly by conceiving her an- 
alogical methods as more scientific than 
they really are, and consequently forget- 
ting the need of constant empirical' confir- 
mation.. She ought not to interfere with the 
household management of the special sci- 
ences, — no more with that of mental science 
than with that of natural science. Her philo- 
sophical duty is at the outposts of scientific 
thought; her task is to give ultimate in- 
terpretations. The theory of knowledge 
led us to a transcendent notion (Grenz- 
begriff) of that which in our world- view oc- 
casions the unending conflict between quality 
and quantity, elementary and ideal concepts 
of causality, subject and object. If we call 
that which lies at the basis of these antitheses 
the ' thing-in-itself , ' then this expression in- 
dicates the philosophical place of meta- 
physics or of cosmology. 



The Problem of Being 127 

The final interpretation will bear more 
the impress of art than of science. The 
transition from the empirical and critical 
parts of philosophy (psychology and episte- 
mology) to cosmology displays a certain 
analogy with the transition from historical 
criticism to historical narrative. The his- 
torian works his critically treated material 
into a totality of events and characters; 
the fragmentary is rounded out, and it 
is a rounding out in which the personality 
of the narrator will necessarily play a 
part. Cosmological philosophy will give 
us, likewise, a complete picture of Being 
on the basis of our knowledge of Being; 
it will work together the scattered features 
into a whole in which a single element 
(the type-phenomenon) exercises especial 
influence, so that the coloring of the 
whole depends on it. Into the choice 
of the type-phenomenon and into the 
carrying out of the analogy, a distinct 
personal element enters. A great philo- 
sophical system is a work of art, a drama. 



128 Philosophical Problems 

The practice of this art will become con- 
stantly more difficult. For hereafter it will 
not only presuppose a wealth of material to 
be arranged and connected together with 
constructive power, but it will also presup- 
pose the ability to avoid dogmatizing, and 
to preserve to ideas their significance, and 
their importance to ideal constructions with- 
out confounding them with absolute truths. 
It requires one, as Lessing said, to think 
gymnastically, not dogmatically. The art 
will consist in coupling bold creative thought 
with watchful critical consciousness. In 
my essay on 'Philosophy as Art,' I have 
especially emphasized this aspect of the 
matter. The artistic element in philo- 
sophic thought was early brought into 
prominence by Schopenhauer.; but he 
had rather in mind the involuntary origin 
of the various systems of thought, which 
displaces the 'why' of science with the 
'what' of art. When Albert Lange called 
philosophic construction an art, he was 
thinking primarily of the idealizing ten- 



The Problem of Being 129 

dency, of the demand to see in ideal images 
an expression of the highest reality. 54 In 
the religious problem, we shall run upon 
a relation that is akin to the just-men- 
tioned transition from science to art; only 
it will in the case of religion be concerned 
with the settlement of a view of life, while 
here it is concerned with a view of the 
world. 

As the history of philosophy shows, 
the conditions for the exercise of the above- 
mentioned art are not present on a large 
scale at all times. Long accumulation 
of material and of historic points of view, 
intense concentration of spirit, and an 
energy of thought born of the severity of 
the problem are all demanded. We find 
in the history of philosophy that systems 
lie closely grouped together, sometimes con- 
fined to single localities. The fifth and 
fourth centuries before Christ gave birth 
to the great Greek systems, and Athens 
was the centre. In the seventeenth cen- 
tury arose the chief systems of modern 



130 Philosophical Problems 

times, which grew up on the basis of 
the manifoldness of matter, of the new 
thoughts of the Renaissance, and of the 
sciences of Nature just begun. In all 
this, Holland held the central place. At 
the beginning of the nineteenth century, 
the systems of philosophical idealism were 
all founded in Jena, where Kant's pupils 
fell in with Gothe's disciples and with the 
vanguard of romanticism. At such epochs 
philosophy appears as one of the symptoms 
of intellectual progress ; while, in the inter- 
vals, the particular discussions of psycho- 
logical, epistemological, and ethical problems 
go their more leisurely gait. 

I now proceed to call attention to the 
more important type-phenomena which 
may serve as systematic foundations of 
cosmology, and which have historically 
performed such service. 

3 

The first fact, whose consideration as a 
type-phenomenon of Being closely concerns 



TJje Problem of Being 13 1 

philosophy, is that Being is to a great 
extent intelligible: we can recollect phe- 
nomena, infer from one phenomenon to 
another, and find continuity between them. 
And if our hypotheses are proper working 
hypotheses, and also if the old, naif con- 
cept of truth is compelled to yield to the 
dynamic or symbolic concept of truth (see 
III, 2), then the very fact that we are able 
by our powers and our methods to penetrate 
to a certain degree into Being must be 
connected with the essence of Being itself. 
The applicability of a method always con- 
stitutes some evidence as to the constitu- 
tion of the matter to which it is applied. 
The fact that Being is intelligible to us 
indicates an inner unity in Being itself, 
coming to light in the conformity to law 
that characterizes the course of phenomena. 
Our criterion of reality consists, indeed, 
only in a firm connectedness ; and it is but 
a natural extension of this principle when 
we read into Being a unifying power that 
binds single elements and events together. 



132 Philosophical Problems 

Philosophy has a natural tendency to as- 
cend to such a principle. Plato and Gior- 
dano Bruno, Spinoza and Hegel, Fechner 
and Lotze, worked in that direction; and 
even Kant, in spite of his great critical cir- 
cumspection, testifies to the importance of 
this idea. While popular thought is inclined 
to seek a final solution by mounting up the 
ladder of causes until it ends with a first 
cause, — a way which only leads to an end- 
less series, — philosophic thought prefers 
to seek a solution in depth rather than in 
breadth, and to ask what the presupposi- 
tion is on which a rationally connected world 
can somehow be built, however hypotheti- 
cally this may be. Here causation stands as 
the type-phenomenon, and not least on this 
account do discussions about the principle 
of causality lay claim to so large a place 
in the history of modern philosophy. 

In opposition to Monism, which suggests 
itself to us in this way, we may point out 
that the essential condition for the scien- 
tific understanding of phenomena is not 



The Problem of Being 133 

only the assumption of an inner connection 
between them, but also the assumption of 
that plurality of them between which the 
connection takes place, and to which the 
laws discovered by science apply. Why 
not then consider this plurality as the type- 
phenomenon, so that our metaphysics should 
be pluralistic, not monistic? 

The answer to this question is given in 
the fact that we draw all the properties or 
forces with which we endow the elements 
of being (whether we conceive them as 
material atoms or as psychical monads) 
from the law-abiding connected whole whose 
components these elements are. The prop- 
erties of things are the constant ways by 
which they influence, or are influenced by, 
one another. 'Force' is here the element 
that for our mind contains the reason for 
the change of one or more of the other 
elements. The case is just the same with 
the related concepts of energy, possibility, 
and individuality. All these concepts are 
secondary, in comparison with the concept 



134 Philosophical Problems 

of law. In the case of individuality, for 
instance, we must not only think of the law 
denning the behavior of the individual phe- 
nomenon toward its surroundings, but also 
of the law that its inner relations obey. 

Another consideration points in the same 
direction. All knowledge begins with the 
analysis of given observations (perceptions 
or recollections). In order that such a 
perception may become the object of analysis, 
it must first appear as a totality, embracing a 
sum of elements (parts or properties). Every 
cognition starts from a something cut out 
from a greater whole. Every definition is 
a limitation. Every judgment makes use of 
presuppositions which lie beyond the act 
of judgment. Every conclusion presupposes 
several premises whose validity must often 
be established in very diverse ways. We 
always move within a more inclusive whole, 
in 1 which are to be sought the conditions 
for the particular results that we are striv- 
ing after. 

Consequently, if in the world of reality 



The Problem of Being 135 

as well as in the world of pure thought, 
the particular gets its nature and its validity 
from the connected whole in which it 
appears, it would seem as though Monism 
were a more fundamental point of view 
than Pluralism. 

But the theory of knowledge shows that 
reason has its limits. The empiricist and 
the sceptic will always be able to check the 
monistic metaphysician, because they can 
taunt him with the actual limitations of 
knowledge. We cannot even use fact as a 
criterion in a thoroughgoing manner, or 
carry out with strictness the distinction be- 
tween dreaming and reality. With the same 
right with which we reason from the pos- 
sibility of rational knowledge to a unifying 
force in Being, we might, apparently, reason 
to an irrational power in Being, to a cos- 
mological principle that prevented the ele- 
ments of Being from standing in a rationally 
determinable relation to one another. 

But hereupon the monistic party might 
rejoin that the consideration that the unify- 



136 Philosophical Problems 

ing force does not prevail everywhere, may 
indicate that Being itself is to be conceived 
as in process of becoming, of evolving, and 
that what appears to us as law and order 
and connection, is the result of a develop- 
ment in the interior of the existent that is 
not yet complete. From this point of view, 
therefore, it would be time that conditions 
the irrationality. So long as the thought, as 
knowledge, is not completed but still becom- 
ing, just so long Being as a whole cannot be 
complete. Thought and knowledge are them- 
selves a very part of being! And if they are 
in process of becoming, there may well be 
more that is also becoming. It is a strange 
contradiction in the grand rationalistic 
systems, that, although they may be able to 
explain everything else, yet they are power- 
less to explain the striving, laboring nature 
of the thought which produces them. In 
Plato and Spinoza, Hegel and Bostrom, this 
contradiction appears. 

Critical Monism, as I call it, which asserts 
the reality of time, and hence the perma- 



The Problem of Being 137 

nent unfinishedness both of Being and of 
knowledge, can nevertheless still quite prop- 
erly make of causality and rationality the 
type-phenomena of its view of the world. 
It finds, then, in Being a force struggling 
towards unification, which, by progressive 
evolution, overcomes the sporadic and hos- 
tile elements. Perhaps even new elements 
may perpetually arise, which are only to be 
worked together in the same fashion, so that 
the development must begin all over again. 
Thought's own work appears thus in a 
cosmic light. The goal that thought sets 
before itself (even if it replace the static 
with the dynamic concept of truth) is to 
establish a constant connection between 
our methods and hypotheses and the real 
processes of Being. If thought succeeds 
in approaching this goal, then Being itself 
becomes more rational than it was before, 
because a new constant and harmonious 
relation has been wrought out, and now is 
realized. The thinker to whom it is given 
to advance in this direction can rightly say: 



138 Philosophical Problems 

"From place to place we are inside of 
things," no matter how far off and sublime 
the supreme ideal of thought may loom up 
before him. 

4 

Can we not now attempt a real, positive 
determination of the unifying principle which, 
according to the hypotheses thus developed, 
holds Being together in its innermost nature ? 
Every attempt in this direction must to an 
especially high degree bring analogy into 
requisition. Here we have no fundamental 
fact to which we can refer, such as we had 
connecting the problem of Being with the 
problem of knowledge (p. 131). In attempt- 
ing to determine the principle of Being, our 
thought turns to the most fundamental dis- 
tinction which familiar phenomena present, 
viz. the distinction between the psychical 
and the material ; but here it seems as though 
every attempt in a cosmological direction 
must run against a deadlock. 

The position which I adopt, purely me- 
thodically and empirically, for the problem 



The Problem of Being 139 

of mind and matter, has been already devel- 
oped in Chapter II, section 3. But the prob- 
lem comes upon us now from another angle. 
For, whether we be, from the methodical 
and empirical point of view, dualists, mate- 
rialists, or monists, the question still re- 
mains, What do we think of the fundamental 
essence of Being? — what sort of an attri- 
bute lies at the bottom of the way we finally 
think — if we think our final thoughts — of 
Being. 

If I take the analogy with the spatially 
extended and moving as my basis, not only 
my method but my metaphysics will be 
materialistic. As an absolute hypothesis, 
Materialism possesses the advantage of giv- 
ing us the picture of a great continuity, and 
does not compel us to abandon the imme- 
diately perceived. But Materialism is a 
childlike and naive conception. It is the 
first philosophy of man. The impression 
of the connectedness and sweep of the 
material world exercises such overwhelm- 
ing power, that ever and again essays 



140 Philosophical Problems 

are made in the materialistic direction, al- 
though — since the advent of the critical 
philosophy — not with such dogmatic as- 
surance as formerly. They will always be 
shipwrecked either by the impossibility of 
tracing back the psychical to the material, 
or by the epistemological reflection that we 
have matter only as the object of con- 
sciousness, and that, if materialism were 
true, nothing could exist to which the 
material object or phenomenon could be 
presented. Hobbes, whose thinking tended 
decidedly toward materialism, came to a halt 
before the consideration that among all phe- 
nomena the most important is just this, that 
something can be a phenomenon to us at all. 
In contrast with materialism, metaphys- 
ical Idealism makes analogy with psychical 
phenomena its basis. It may meanwhile 
pay homage, empirically, either to dualism 
(so Lotze), or to materialism (so Schopen- 
hauer), or to Spinozistic monism (so Leibniz, 
Fechner, and Wundt). The last word of all 
these forms of Idealism is that only the 



The Problem of Being 141 

analogy with mental conditions which we 
find in ourselves can give us a key to the 
understanding of the innermost nature of 
Being. Only ourselves do we know from 
within, everything else only from without ! 

Psychological experiment has taught us 
that there are many degrees and kinds of 
psychical being, and if we wish to utilize 
them in the exegesis of all Being, we must 
naturally assume that these series of degrees 
and qualities are continued indefinitely. 
Thus, idealistic cosmology may vary greatly, 
and historically it appears under many forms, 
which have been conditioned by other mo- 
tives determining the world-view (e.g. by 
the tendency to optimism or pessimism, by 
the special emphasis on thought or on will, 
etc.). As far back as the Indian Upanishads 
it appeared in the doctrine that Br&hman 
(the world-principle) is Atman (soul). 

Sometimes idealists deny that they are 
using an argument from analogy, and as- 
sert that their metaphysical Idealism (or 
idealistic cosmology) has been reached by 



142 Philosophical Problems 

the straight path of logical construction, 
of dialectical method. But the very proud- 
est structure of thought that a man ever 
flattered himself to have successfully erected, 
namely Hegel's system, really only seeks to 
show that everything in Being is connected 
just as thoughts are in the mind of man; 
in point of fact, the human mind is used 
by Hegel as the basis of an analogy, simply 
because it is the best example of an internal 
totality which we possess. 55 

The idealistic reasoning by analogy could 
only lead to a final solution if we were vouch- 
safed the means of positively determining 
the different degrees and kinds of psychical 
existence which must be met with in the 
world, so far as metaphysical idealism holds 
good. But, as I have shown in a former 
connection (II, 3), we are not in a position 
to go farther than an indefinite notion of 
potential psychical energy. A verification 
of Idealism is impossible. Even if Idealism 
could be thoroughly carried out, yet the 
difficulty would remain that matter could 



The Problem of Being 143 

no more be derived from the psychical than 
the psychical from matter. 

But it is by no means certain that we are 
forced to preserve a neutrality between the 
materialistic and the idealistic solutions of 
the problem of Being. The distinction be- 
tween mind and matter is to be sure a 
cardinal one in the content of our experience ; 
but there is no proof that there is no other 
attribute in being besides these two. // the 
problem of Being had to be solved by human 
experience, then one of the two possibilities 
would have to be chosen. But the question 
is whether our experience furnishes us with 
sufficient elements for a real solution. The 
empire of Being may be much vaster than 
the possibilities of our experience. Here, 
again, it is true that the world is great, but 
our mind is small ; again we come upon the 
irrational. If it could be proved that the dis- 
tinction between mind and matter were a con- 
tradictory, not a contrary, that consequently 
there was in things an absolute " either — 
or," then the problem of Being would be 



144 Philosophical Problems 

simpler than it is ; and yet it would be more 
complex than human thought — inclined, 
as that is, to think itself fully accoutred for 
religious and metaphysical speculation — 
has often supposed. Critical Monism,, which 
strives to maintain the thought of unity 
without dogmatizing, must perceive that 
it is lacking in the prerequisites for a com- 
plete solution. The possibility that there 
are more forms than our experience exhibits 
may signify that the whole problem lies 
deeper than has been supposed. There 
might, for example, be a tap-root of Being 
from which both mind and matter sprang, 
and the insolubility of the problem might be 
due to our ignorance of this tap-root. 

5 

A third type-phenomenon has to be chosen 
when we make our choice between con- 
servation and development (being and be- 
coming). Ancient thought was throughout 
inclined to hold fast to unmoved Being; it 
was a conceptual philosophy, which first and 



The Problem of Being 145 

foremost sought to trace back phenomena to 
fixed generic concepts. Plato's doctrine of 
ideas formed the pinnacle of this attempt 
(cf. II, i). This tendency — or the same 
psychical bent which it exemplifies — not 
infrequently comes to the front in modern re- 
search, and, for that matter, not only in phi- 
losophy, but in science generally where fixed, 
unchangeable modes or types are striven for. 
Even when ancient thought accepted the idea 
of evolution, it was still peculiarly prone to 
believe in a rhythmical process which would 
repeatedly bring around the same conditions 
and events. Evolution as a constantly ad- 
vancing series of changes is a modern idea, 
for which we are indebted to wider experi- 
ence in the realms of both history and nature, 
but which has been formed under the influ- 
ence of the Perso- Christian type of religion. 56 
The leading part played by the concept 
of evolution in modern thought is connected 
with the fact that the concept of causality 
has been so prominent. The more the 
elementary concept of causality is approxi- 



146 Philosophical Problems 

mated, by continued research, to the ideal 
concept of causality, the more will the 
causal relation betoken a continuous process 
in which the succeeding members are de- 
termined by the preceding. The concept of 
evolution involves, as soon as it is proved, 
the idea that direction is an essential fact, 
so that successions cannot be reversed (III, 
4). While formal science, which rests upon 
the principle of identity, can move forward 
or backward in its trains of thought, the 
time-relation, that is, the direction of time, 
has a different importance for real science, 
which on this account possesses an historical 
character. In it the concept of s event' 
is a type- phenomenon. But in the con- 
cept of evolution the idea is involved that 
something not only happens, but also that, 
through the series of events, results are 
reached which bear a certain wholeness of 
character, because a multiplicity of ele- 
ments have been so united that, in spite of 
their differences, they operate jointly and 
with a certain finality upon their environ- 



The Problem of Being 147 

merit. Above all others, Herbert Spencer 
has copiously illustrated and analyzed the 
idea of evolution, and has maintained that 
its essential earmark is the union of differ- 
entiation with integration. With this con- 
ception as a measuring rod, we determine 
which — from a purely theoretical point of 
view — are to be called ' lower ' and which 
'higher' states or forms in a changing 
series. 

In spite of its connection with the concept 
of causality, the notion of evolution is an 
independent concept, underivable from the 
general causal concept, although it presup- 
poses the latter. The doctrine of causality 
would be valid even if there only took place 
a rhythmical fluctuation without the pro- 
gressive formation of new totalities. Evo- 
lution stands as an empirical fact that throws 
light over the nature of being. Abstractly 
considered, it would be quite possible that 
the different causal series of beings should 
either not unite with one another at all, or 
should only coincide so as to bring about 



148 Philosophical Problems 

discordant collisions. But experience shows 
how they can, under certain conditions, so 
come together that they unite in more com- 
posite processes and beget peculiar totalities. 
The formation of star- systems ; the origin, 
organization, and unfolding of life, the exist- 
ence of the spiritual life, and of the social 
and historical life of man ; all bear witness to 
an individualizing and totalizing tendency 
in Being. These phenomena set before 
research the greatest of problems; if we 
point to them as type-phenomena, we decide 
nothing whatever as to whether the prob- 
lems are soluble or not; we consider them 
only as characteristics of Being, given once 
for all. It is to be added here, that it is 
surely a grave misunderstanding to think, 
as not a few do think, that these phenomena 
would be more worthy of note, if they were 
not explicable by laws discoverable by sci- 
ence. On the contrary, if a ' natural' ex- 
planation could be found, we could then 
with greater assurance than before draw 
the inference that the individualizing and 



The Problem of Being 149 

totalizing tendency is grounded deep in 
the bedrock of being. 

But how deep? Experience often shows 
us not only a purely external and indiffer- 
ent relation between different causal series, 
but often collisions or, at least, inharmoni- 
ous conditions between such series, which 
hinder the origin or upbuilding of individu- 
alities and totalities. On evolution follows 
dissolution ; and the question arises, whether 
the rhythmic change of these processes leaves 
traces of any general progressive course of 
development, or whether we must hold by 
the ancient idea of a recurrent rhythm as 
the last word on the problem. 

Here, once more, the irrational crops 
out; but in more acute form than at the 
earlier points where we met with it. Here 
it indicates arrest and dissolution, the ten- 
dency to remain at the most elementary 
forms of Being, or to go back to them. 
Being has here, the deeper our investigations 
penetrate into it, the form of a conflict, of 
a great battle, which all forms that bear 



150 Philosophical Problems 

the impress of individuality or totality 
must fight for their very existence. The 
battle itself is two-sided: it may be a 
means of development, but it may also lead 
to death. Which of the two possibilities is 
predominant ? 

With this we see more clearly than at the 
earlier points the impossibility of forming 
an absolutely final concept of Being as a 
whole. If conflicts between elements and 
between finite wholes be an essential char- 
acteristic of Being, then it must be a trait 
which is to be found only in limited sections 
of Being, but not in Being considered as a 
totality; because an absolute totality can 
encounter no external opposition, and can 
wage no battle for existence. So we must 
content ourselves with saying that wherever 
we find Being, we also find within it such 
a strife going on between elements and 
totalities. The great question is whether 
out of this strife the elements or the totalities 
(the solar systems, organisms, souls, human 
societies) will come off victorious. Em- 



The Problem of Being 151 

pirically, we stand in the midst of the vast 
world-process and can go no farther than to 
assert that we apply no purely subjective 
standard when we designate one form of 
Being as higher or lower than another, 
because evolution, which involves this dis- 
tinction, is a phenomenon characteristic of 
all the Being known to us, — is, in short, 
a type-phenomenon. 

This result, with which we are now about 
to leave the problem of Being, enables us 
to pass naturally to the last of our problems, 
the problem of ideal goods. 

If Being were finished, harmoniously and 
unchangeably, Ethics would be impossible. 
All Ethics demands that there be effort. 
But there would be no room for effort, if 
everything were in eternal and actual com- 
pleteness. The necessity devolving upon all 
individualities and totalities to fight for their 
existence, the fact that there are always dis- 
cords to overcome, discordant tendencies to 
unite, — it is precisely that that makes Ethics 
possible. In other words, Ethics investi- 



152 Philosophical Problems 

gates the principles of an extension of the 
individualizing and totalizing tendency of 
Being, of which experience gives evidence. 
Ethics rests upon a self-contradiction, unless 
the course of the world is, or may be, par- 
tially conditioned by human will, just as 
it is, or may be, partially conditioned by 
human thought (p. 137). So Ethics takes 
up the problem of continuity where the first 
three problems laid it down. 

The religious problem is even more closely 
connected with the foregoing considerations, 
because, as I shall try to point out, it is 
concerned with the continuance of values 
during the struggles for existence that Being 
seems to involve. 



CHAPTER IV 
THE PROBLEM OF VALUES 




JHE treatment of the problem of 
the Good as a special problem 
presupposes a separation be- 
tween understanding and evalu- 
ation, which has not always been recog- 
nized, and has not yet been fought to a 
finish. Philosophy has been inclined to 
permit their intermingling. So Plato's 
'Ideas' and Spinoza's 'Substance' express 
by the same term how those two thinkers 
understood Being and how they estimated its 
worth. At least there has been a tendency 
to make appreciation only a consequence 
of understanding, while, conversely, mys- 
tical and theological schools have been in- 
clined to treat understanding as dependent 
on appreciation. In any event, they are 
by no means entirely independent of one 
153 



154 Philosophical Problems 

another. The understanding has its value, 
and without value it would be non-extant, 
since men would then cease to strive after 
it. To some the joy of knowledge is 
indeed the very highest; and the principles 
of our evaluation of goods can become 
an object for psychological and historical 
understanding because all worth rests on 
the relation of events and of conditions to 
life at its different stages, to the existence 
and evolution of life. It is now evident 
that the problem of values exhibits an 
analogy with the three earlier theoretical 
problems. In the sphere of value, just 
as in that of personality, of knowledge, and 
of Being, it is the principle of continuity 
that leads to the momentous problems. 

Whatever conduces to satisfaction or 
supplies a need has worth, or is a good. 
Sometimes it is through the arising of a sat- 
isfaction that we first notice that there has 
been a lack in our existence. Sometimes 
we notice this lack in advance, and it gives 
rise to want, or breeds impulse and desire. 



The Problem of Values 155 

If the worth-possessing thing cannot be 
immediately grasped, we erect it into a 
purpose and seek means whereby to attain 
it. Whatever appears to us as a means 
of winning a thing of immediate worth, 
possesses mediate worth for us. In our 
estimation of worth and our purposes, 
the inner nature of our feeling and will 
is revealed. As the concept of purpose de- 
pends on the concept of worth, so also 
the concept of the norm depends on the 
concept of purpose. The norm is the rule 
for the activity which is necessary to attain 
the purpose. 57 It was a fatal thing for 
the treatment of the problem of worth 
when Immanuel Kant reversed the relation 
and tried to derive the concepts of purpose 
and of worth from the concept of the norm 
(of law). This is a psychological im- 
possibility. 

Experience shows that different stand- 
ards of worth have validity for different 
individuals and for the same individual 
at different times. I have already men- 



156 Philosophical Problems 

tioned the worth of knowledge; besides 
this, we must especially mention the worths 
which are bound up with the demand for 
self-preservation and with the organiza- 
tion and development of life in greater or 
smaller ways, — with movement and activity, 
with imagination (whether fanciful or of 
reality), etc. If different standards of value 
are to be compared with one another, — 
and every known standard of value is 
subject to such a comparison, — then a 
primordial value must be presupposed, by 
which the rank of other values can be fixed. 
A definite standard must be laid down as 
an ideal measure for all other values, if 
consistent thought and study in the realm 
of value are to be possible. Then, with 
a given fundamental standard — supposing 
we have sufficient experience — we can con- 
struct a system for estimating values, in 
which every particular good will hold its 
place according to its relation to this funda- 
mental standard. But thought, ' practical 
reason' is needed in order to determine 



The Problem of Values 157 

this relation; and in order, at the same 
time, to find ways and means of producing 
or discovering particular values under par- 
ticular conditions. In a vacuum no esti- 
mation of worth (or unworth) is possible. 
The concept of the primordial or ideal 
.standard-good is in the problem of values 
(in Ethics, therefore, and in the philosophy 
of religion) what the concept of the type- 
phenomenon is in the problem of Being 
(in metaphysics therefore). 

The problem of estimating values divides 
itself into two problems, the ethical and the 
religious. Ethical worth is concerned with 
human affairs, property, and institutions; 
religious worth reaches farther and ap- 
praises Being according to the fate of 
values in the world of reality. It will be- 
come evident that in both problems — as 
in our earlier problems — the relation be- 
tween continuity and discontinuity is of 
decisive importance. 



158 Philosophical Problems 

2 

A. The Ethical Problem 
(a) Ethical Work 

As the discussion of the problem of Being 
showed, there is room for work being done 
by means of which Being develops itself. 
Such work is done in all human culture, 
but especially in ethical endeavor. This 
latter may be designated as an effort to pro- 
duce greater continuity, partly in the single 
personality, partly among different per- 
sonalities. We shall find that the measur- 
ing rod of ethical endeavor, and the 
principle of ethical good, are determined 
by the principle of continuity. 

Personality presupposes coherence, or 
continuity; and this, again, demands as a 
condition that there should be a single pri- 
mordial value that determines the value of 
single instants, periods of life, abilities, and 
impulses. The development of true per- 
sonality presupposes a striving to get 



The Problem of Values 159 

away from the momentary and the spo- 
radic, — an overcoming of the tendency 
to isolation and tyranny on the part of 
single moments or demands. It is a process 
of harmoniously incorporating the single 
moments and elements with the personal 
life as a whole. Here is a task to per- 
form, a battle to be waged, that demands 
different degrees of energy in different 
individuals. 

There are, it is true, moral attitudes 
which, in opposition to the whole of life, 
contend for the rights of the single instants 
and impulses, of the successive and simul- 
taneous differences. But that is not incon- 
sistent with the fact that the principle of 
continuity is the standard of measurement. 
Such attitudes may be justified so far as 
they insist that the subordination of mo- 
ments and particular impulses shall be 
grounded. Continuity signifies, not absence 
of distinction, but the ordering of differ- 
ences in a graded series. Life as a whole 
can always be called to account by single 



160 Philosophical Problems 

elements in it. It will always seem an 
imperfection, when an instant, a period, a 
capacity, or an impulse is treated as a bare 
means to something other, without inde- 
pendent value of its own. The art of life 
consists in conferring immediate and medi- 
ate worth upon things at the same time. 
When the Ethic of the instant and the particu- 
lar steps out in absolute form and proclaims 
the sovereignty of the single moment or 
element, one often finds at bottom a pre- 
supposition that all life is represented by 
the single instant or demand, or is concen- 
trated in it, so that all other considera- 
tions fade away. This happens in great 
moments of self-sacrifice, when a man, 
as Aristotle says, would rather perform 
a single great and noble deed than many 
small ones; and it also happens when a 
man hears the summons of his whole life 
in the special development of a single talent. 
Or one may believe in such a harmony 
among all the different moments of life 
that complete absorption into one of them 



The Problem of Values 161 

is possible without the satisfaction of that 
moment robbing the other moments at all. 
This appears to have been Aristippus's view. 
Or the highest state may be that of floating 
above single moments and employments, 
with the power to let one's self down 
at will and without being bound for any 
length of time to a single point, as in the 
' aesthetic' view of life depicted by S. Kier- 
kegaard in the first volume of his ' Either — 
Or' (Entweder-Oder). All these views evi- 
dently are not without regard to the whole 
of life as their background. 

When an opposition of the momentary or 
the sporadic to the demands of the whole 
occurs, there arises a more or less conscious 
and energetic striving to develop the per- 
sonality into a work of art, such that every 
single moment and every power shall have 
its appointed place and its due right. In 
such a personality, no element is considered 
purely and simply as a means; it is also 
at the same time an end. That which 
acts as a means or transitional factor in the 



162 Philosophical Problems 

development of the personality, must also 
as far as possible possess worth in itself. 
This is the ever memorable basic idea oj 
the Greek (Platonic-Aristotelian) Ethics of 
the harmonious unfolding of the soul as 
the supreme end, a basic idea which has 
peculiar importance in view of the tendency 
of modern culture to isolate or to mechanize 
the single elements of life. Rousseau and 
Schiller revived this ancient doctrine in 
opposition to the modern slavery to work, 
no less than to sentimentalism and deca- 
dence. 

But the problem of continuity crops 
out again, and in a very acute form, in 
the question as to whether a single person 
can create for himself a rounded and com- 
pleted world, and whether, if so, it would 
be valuable. Not only must the individual 
always stand in reciprocal relations with 
other personalities in order to have means 
for his own development, but there is also a 
need of devoting oneself that may appear 
under various forms, and that may lead 



The Problem of Values 163 

one to attribute immediate worth to other 
personalities. Hereby the individual is 
drawn into the great kingdom of person- 
alities, and as, previously, the question 
was whether the individual elements can 
coordinate themselves harmoniously within 
a single personality, so now the wider ques- 
tion is, how far individual personalities 
can develop themselves independently and 
yet in reciprocal harmony, so that there 
may be a social organism (soziale Lebens- 
totalitat) analogous to the individual or- 
ganism. A continuity of continuity is thus 
striven after. The test of the perfection of 
a human society — by virtue of the prin- 
ciple of continuity which here clearly shows 
its connection with the principle of welfare 
— is: to what degree is every person so 
placed and treated that he is not only a 
mere means, but also always at the same 
time an end? This is Kant's famous dic- 
tum, with another motive than that given to 
it by him. 58 Stoic and Christian ethics and 
modern social and political evolution bear in 



164 Philosophical Problems 

the same direction. The proclamation of 
the 'rights of man' (whether we consider 
them as a symptom or as a programme) 
issues from this assumption; and the sting 
of the social question arises from the fact 
that the assumption has not been ful- 
filled. This principle also furnishes the 
standard for the discussion of special 
ethical and jurisprudential questions. For 
example, this principle can be laid at the 
base of monogamy, and of the evolution 
of punishment. 

Ethical work thus shows itself to be a 
peculiar continuation of the great process 
of Being. The whole course of thought 
by which I have sought to establish this 
point of view meets, however, unexpected 
difficulties which intensify the ethical prob- 
lem. So here again we run up against the 
irrational. 



The Problem of Values 165 

3 

(b) The Rationality of our Ethical 
Evaluations 

Ethics would be a more complete science 
than it is if the earning out of the principle 
of continuity did not encounter so many 
difficulties as it does. 

Ever}' ethical reasoning has validity only 
so far as the disputants recognize a definite 
primordial value which determines all more 
special goods. One may take the stand- 
point of the single instant, or of the single 
impulse, or the standpoint of the isolated 
personality, or that of the family, the class, 
the state, or of mankind. The question 
is, whether all such standpoints can be 
brought into real harmony with one an- 
other, as we have above assumed; and, 
especially the question arises, whether it is 
possible by means of argument to convert 
to one of the other standpoints those who 
consistently and imperiously hold fast to a 
single one of them. 



166 Philosophical Problems 

Probably a rational relation might be de- 
monstrated between the standard of value 
and the special values, so that a person who 
recognizes a certain standard and is suffi- 
ciently acquainted with the actual conditions 
under which it holds good, could also be logi- 
cally compelled to grant whatever conclu- 
sions might be deduced from that standard. 
Thus self-assertion and abnegation have 
each its logic, as well as family- feeling and 
national feeling. But how about the transi- 
tion from one standard to another? Here 
inner consistency does not suffice ; for con- 
sistency can only unfold and bring to 
consciousness what, under given actual con- 
ditions, should follow from the standard. 
Socrates became the founder of Ethics by 
his demand for self-knowledge, which, in 
fact, was only a demand for a clear under- 
standing of one's own standard of good 
and of the results consistently flowing from 
it. But he did not closely examine how 
the standard is obtained, or whether 
there are not really several standards 



The Problem of Values 167 

which might each lay claim to be the 
fundamental one. 

A standard of value grows up by means 
of psychological and historical processes that 
involve other factors than logical consistency 
and knowledge of facts. Through experi- 
ence and association, motives and values 
get supplanted and displaced, so that one 
standard may pass over into another; but 
while the change in the feelings and will 
is going on, it will be useless to argue from 
principles which will appear to be such only 
at the end of the process. In education, 
one cannot argue with a child on the pre- 
suppositions of an adult ; the child must first 
have worked out those presuppositions. And 
so it is in the great educational process tak- 
ing place in history. During education and 
evolution, there are naturally other vital 
motives at work than those which come 
out as the result of the whole process. The 
pupil will therefore never rationally under- 
stand the system according to which he is 
being educated. "Who can speak of its 



168 Philosophical Problems 

future food to the caterpillar crawling in 
the dust?" 

In history there is no gently advancing 
education from primitive to higher stand- 
ards of worth, i.e. to standards which will 
be called higher by those who shall have 
attained to them. History is the great 
voting place for standards of value. In 
it, individual stands against individual, the 
individual against society, and one society 
against another ; and a new standard often 
establishes itself in the hearts of men only 
after fierce struggles. A pertinent example 
is afforded by the way in which the conquests 
of Alexander the Great and of the Romans 
paved the way for the advance of a more uni- 
versal humane feeling. During great con- 
flicts, ethical reflection can only indirectly 
take a hand, by drawing the distinctive con- 
sequences of each point of view, and illustrat- 
ing their meaning by as many experiences 
as possible, — in a word, by furthering self- 
knowledge in the Socratic sense. In war 
or in education, we have to do with art; 



The Problem of Values 169 

science is not enough, however important 
its contributions may often prove to be. 

Because we reach the boundary where 
scientific ethics stop, still we by no means 
on that account abandon the principle of 
continuity. Where it is not possible to 
follow continuity farther in its purely 
ethical form, we attempt to track it down 
in its psychological and historical form. 
Ethics at this point passes over into psy- 
chology and sociology. 

In my own ' Ethics ' I have sought to 
show that justice, conceived as an inward 
harmonious relation between self-assertion 
and self-surrender, and also between feeling 
and thought, is the highest trait of character. 
But this has been contested by philosophical 
thinkers on the ground that self-assertion 
and self-surrender are such opposite tenden- 
cies (or, as I should say, primordial values), 
that it is impossible to combine them in any 
one unifying conception. 60 And in popular 
literature self-surrender (altruism) has been 
as uncompromisingly proclaimed by Tolstoy 



170 Philosophical Problems 

as self-assertion has been by Friedrich 
Nietzsche. This is an example of a con- 
flict between standards of worth which are 
both urged simultaneously. In our actual 
human life, there is apparently a con- 
stant oscillation going on between these 
two antagonistic poles. In the species as a 
whole, self-assertion no less than altruism 
has its function to perform. The worth 
of the single oscillation toward the one 
direction or the other will always depend 
upon whether it conduces to an order of 
life in which every personality can develop 
as characteristically and independently as 
possible, so as to thereby render the most 
aid in the similar evolution of other men. 
In single individuals, self-assertion and 
altruism stand in the most various relations 
to each other, and their harmonization — 
in which, in my opinion, Justice consists — 
will therefore present the most divergent 
shades and tones in different men and at 
different times. But this variety also belongs 
to the richness of life — and to its con- 



The Problem of Values 171 

tinuity. The multiplicity of shades of dif- 
ference is a condition of relation and connect- 
edness, and distinguishes the system in which 
these prevail from that dead uniformity 
which neither from an ethical nor from any 
other standpoint possesses any worth what- 
ever. 

4 
Another difficulty bound up with dis- 
continuity springs out of the fact that the 
conclusions, which under certain conditions 
are deduced from a standard of worth, 
must be applied to individuals who present 
the most diverse inner and outer facilities 
for the fulfilment of demands based upon 
such deductions. Endowment and im- 
pulse are not the same in all individuals, 
either in kind or in degree. One and the 
same demand applied to different indi- 
viduals may enjoin upon each of them an 
entirely different ethical task. The start- 
ing point and initial velocity are different. 
Some individuals may be well on the way 
to the involuntary fulfilment of the de- 



172 Philosophical Problems 

mand, before they are even conscious of 
its existence; while others must laboriously 
struggle in order barely to start. The 
law, the demand, must therefore be differ- 
entiated according to the different indi- 
viduals, if it is really to be identical for all. 
Each one should be taxed according to 
his ability. There must be a thorough- 
going individualizing of the ethical demand, 
lest Ethics itself transgress the dictum 
that personality is always an end, never a 
mere means. The ethical demand must 
be no abstract or external command, but 
should correspond to the ethical possi- 
bilities of the individual person, and be 
adapted to develop them. Legislation and 
pedagogics cannot at this point be abso- 
lutely sundered. But in individual cases 
this makes ethical decisions difficult. 61 Here 
again the world — the world of personalities 
— is great, and our mind is small. Ethical 
thought can formulate no law that could 
be applied offhand to all the manifold 
emergencies of life. Nevertheless, we must 



The Problem of Values 173 

assume that in every individual case only 
a single decision can be the completely 
right one. " Wide is the world and narrow 
is our brain : " our ethical thought courses 
along the narrow path which leads to ethi- 
cal truth, and presses toward it amid con- 
tinual battles with the irrationality that 
we seek to outflank and elude by ever 
nearer approaches to our goal. Here, as in 
the problem of knowledge, we end with no 
absolute conclusion, but we hear still an 
1 excelsior ! ' — even after our thought has 
strained itself to the utmost. 

B. The Religious Problem 

5 
The very fact that a religious problem 
exists shows the importance of conti- 
nuity. For the fact that religion has be- 
come a problem is connected with the 
fact that a division of labor, a differentia- 
tion, has taken place in the realm of the 
psychic life. During its classic times 
religion appears as the sole, concentrated 



174 Philosophical Problems 

form under which all demands of the 
mental life find satisfaction; religion as 
such is not only succor and consolation, 
but also poetry, morals, and science, or at 
any rate, it is in a position to take these 
interests organically into itself. Since 
these different interests have emancipated 
themselves and have developed accord- 
ing to their own laws, the question has 
arisen, whether the mental life — as far 
as it has to do with values — has preserved 
its continuity during this passage from 
concentration to differentiation. We have 
no reason to doubt that there is in the 
process a psychological and historical con- 
tinuity; but by the transition has not 
some value been lost out of human life? 
The replies to this question are extremely 
varied. Some are satisfied with the fact 
that the same dogmas are taught now as 
in former times. In other circles it is re- 
torted that this dogmatic continuity signifies 
nothing; the essential thing is whether life 
is lived in the same way, whether there is 



The Problem of Values 175 

an ethical continuity, whether 'the Chris- 
tianity of the New Testament' still exists. 
Finally, some think that with the cultural- 
historical division of labor the times of re- 
ligion have been left behind, and that, far 
from indicating a loss of worth, this is a real 
gain for our inner life. In addition to 
these opinions, which again may take on 
various shadings, there is a series of still 
other points of view. 

The answer to the question naturally de- 
pends on what we hold to be the essential 
thing in religion. Continuity cannot con- 
sort with traits that divide the various re- 
ligions and religious attitudes from one 
another. One must search out the deepest 
underlying tendencies, which may reveal 
themselves under extremely different forms, 
and which perhaps are able to operate even 
after the cultural-historical division of labor 
has come into force. This is the task of the 
philosophy of religion; and it seeks to dis- 
charge it chiefly in two ways. First, it 
institutes a comparison between religion 



176 Philosophical Problems 

and the other sides of our mental life, in 
order to find out in which region of 
life religion makes its home; it seeks to 
determine the psychological location of re- 
ligion. Secondly, it institutes a comparison 
between the most important historical forms 
of religion, in order to find out whether the 
ascertained psychological definition is con- 
firmed by experience. 62 

In both comparisons we shall have occa- 
sion to see, not only that the principle of 
continuity is concerned with setting the reli- 
gious problem, but also that the notion of 
religion itself is very intimately bound up 
with this principle. 



Religious feeling can be brought into a 
simple enough relation to other feelings, if one 
conceives it as determined by the experiences 
which man has as to the fate of values, 
of the various things that he regards as hav- 
ing worth, in the world of reality. By thus 
considering it, its difference from, and at 



The Problem of Values 177 

the same time its connection with, the other 
feelings are set in relief. Every one of our 
feelings answers to some value. Thus the 
feeling of life, the intellectual, the aesthetic, 
and the ethical feelings express the worth of 
different kinds of things. The conservation 
and development of life, truth, beauty, and 
goodness are realms of value in which man 
can participate without religious feeling. 
But if it becomes evident that life, truth, 
beauty, and goodness must fight in order to 
maintain themselves in the world, then there 
arises a peculiar feeling, no longer deter- 
mined by these ideals per se, but by the 
more general question of whether these and 
similar ideals are destined to be preserved 
and cared for, or are doomed to decay. The 
experiences which man has in this regard 
may create a desire to believe that the val- 
ues remain, even when they no longer dis- 
close themselves in the world visible to man, 
or even if they no longer appear under the 
same forms as hitherto. 

Man will at first be most inclined to sup- 



178 Philosophical Problems 

pose that the enduring thing of worth is the 
same which he has hitherto enjoyed; but 
in his evolution he may come to the convic- 
tion that some of the goods of his experience 
must go under, in order that a higher and 
more comprehensive system of goods may 
be secured. From the ideas of men about 
a world of Gods and about a future life, 
we ascertain which goods have been most 
valued by them, and to what degree they 
have reconciled themselves to the thought 
that particular values must undergo a meta- 
morphosis in order that a general preser- 
vation of value itself may be attained. 
Finally, what is supposed to persist and be 
preserved may take a form that no eye hath 
seen nor ear heard. Religious faith as- 
serts a continuity in the realm of ideals 
that may go beyond any and every possible 
experience. The continuity thus asserted 
may be of diverse content and compass. 
But there will be a tendency in us to ex- 
tend its sway beyond the human world and 
to treat our mundane existence as a nursery 



The Problem of Values 179 

for the evolution and the conservation of 
ideals. This religious doctrine of continuity 
is formed analogously to the intellectualist 
presupposition of the rationality of Being 
(Chapter III), and has similar difficulties to 
encounter. 

Religious faith will especially display a 
certain similarity (and a certain sympathy) 
with metaphysical idealism (IV, 4). But 
they do not stand or fall together. The 
essence of religious faith is not the intel- 
lectual satisfaction which it may bestow. 
The ideas by means of which religion ex- 
presses itself do not belong to its innermost 
psychological nature. If our psychological 
definition is correct, the core of religion is 
an interest of feeling and will. Intellectu- 
ally, we only ask about the classification of 
things, their mutual consecutiveness or ration- 
ality, and their causal linkage (III, 1 ). Faith 
is only an object of science, is not itself science. 
It arises from the harmonious or inharmoni- 
ous relation between the realities which our 
understanding shows us to be actually given 



180 Philosophical Problems 

and the goods which appear to man to be 
the highest. 

Possibly the distinction which we are com- 
pelled to make between the real and the 
good, only holds from a human point of 
view. But, for the present, we can take no 
other point of view. 

The faith in the conservation of values 
may itself acquire a value, both because it 
braces the spirit of man during the strug- 
gle for life, and because it spurs him on to 
find new goods as equivalents of vanishing 
ones. Even one who is of the opinion 
that the times of religion have gone by — 
an opinion which must be epistemologically, 
psychologically, and ethically grounded, if 
it is to be more than an assertion or a 
wish — will still feel the necessity of find- 
ing equivalents for the loss of belief in those 
goods which the vanishing of religion en- 
tails. In this sense there exists a religious 
problem even for one who thinks that the 
kernel of religion disappears along with its 
shell. Religion, in other words, because 



The Problem of Values 181 

it maintains the conservation of values, has 
a value itself, a value of the second order. 
It is one of the most concentrated forms 
of psychic life which experience exhibits. 
Where it is genuine and original, it appears 
as the combined result of human feeling 
and will; and it bodies itself forth by 
means of the most powerful and exalted 
forms of imagination of which the mind of 
man disposes. Probably this concentrated 
vital process will always be revealing itself 
in new forms, — one may then continue to 
use the name religion for them, or not, as 
one pleases. 

7 
A confirmation of the characteristics of 
the essence of religion, as depicted above, 
is to be sought in the fact that the differences 
of religions or of religious points of view can 
be simply and readily explained by those 
characteristics. These differences, in fact, 
rest in part on differences in the ideal 
goods whose conservation is believed in; 
in part on differences in the underlying con- 



182 Philosophical Problems 

ception of reality ; and in part on differences 
of experience as to the relation between the 
ideal goods and reality. 

The differences respecting ideal goods 
show themselves in historical religions in 
what is considered to be the task of the Gods, 
— in what they are thought of as battling 
against; or else, to use a saying of Plato, 
in that which makes God godlike. 63 This 
may be the purely physical preservation of 
life along with its accompanying enjoyments 
or it may be the Good, the Beautiful, 
and the True. The historian of religion 
holds up the transition from natural re- 
ligion to ethical religion as the most 
important step in the history of religion. 
This transition, however, rests directly 
upon a transition from the more element- 
ary to the more ideal standards of worth, 
as what we suppose particularly to underlie 
our relation to the gods, — what the gods 
protect and what gives to them their very 
divinity. At the same time, the more ex- 
ternal relation between man and the powers 



The Problem of Values I83 

which, as he believes, protect him, gives 
way, and the gods themselves become im- 
mediate representatives of the goods placed 
under their surveillance, — become, indeed, 
one with them. In the evolution of reli- 
gion, there can be traced an even more 
intimate connection of religion with Ethics, 
and religion consequently tends to be- 
come increasingly a projection of our 
ethical ideals. 

When advancing knowledge entails changes 
in our beliefs concerning reality, there must 
also be changes in the character of religion 
no less marked than when the funda- 
mental standards of value change. The 
most striking religious crises proceed from 
new conceptions of reality. Religion has in 
these cases usually held herself aloof from 
knowledge developed in other ways, but 
has afterward sought to absorb it and use 
it for her own symbolic purposes. Thus, 
little by little, animism, astronomy, the 
doctrine of the transmigration of souls, the 
Indian and Greek philosophies, Copernican- 



184 Philosophical Problems 

ism, and modern natural science and phi- 
losophy have each in turn been seized, now 
as welcome forms of religious thought, now 
as expansive impulses, or, again, as hostile 
tendencies. 

But the decisive point will always be 
the relation between the ideal goods and 
reality. According as this relation is har- 
moniously or inharmoniously adjusted in 
the experience of man, religion assumes a 
different character; in the highest religions 
the discords as well as the harmonies of 
life find place; in these religions, the reli- 
gious sentiment attains sublimity and firm- 
ness only if it has worked up through 
struggle and suffering to blessedness. The 
strength of the discords accordingly only 
measures the strength of the triumphant 
harmony. And here yet another considera- 
tion enters. Religion possesses a different 
character according as that which possesses 
highest worth is thought of as eternal and 
exalted above all becoming and all change, 
so that the temporal life is in the end only 



The Problem of Values 185 

an illusion; or as that which possesses su- 
preme worth is itself held to evolve in the 
course of ages and to battle for its own 
preservation during the changes which take 
place. On this distinction rests the antith- 
esis between the Indo-Grecian and Perso- 
Christian types of religion. 

Thus it appears to be no external stand- 
ard which we apply when we character- 
ize and appraise religions according to the 
manner and the degree in which the prin- 
ciple of the conservation of values appears 
in them. Such a standard naturally emerges 
from a comparative consideration of the 
history of religions and of religious points 
of view. 

The second of the two religious types 
named has come off victorious in history. 
But assuredly it has not yet reached its defin- 
itive form. If it is to take on new forms, 
then in the future, as in olden times, we shall 
be indebted to prophetic personalities ; only 
such as they can weave a new garment for 
Deity. 



186 Philosophical Problems 

To the philosopher, it is of the greatest 
interest that the religious problem, so long 
as it exists, stands in such close connection 
with the demand for continuity, with the 
notion of time, and with the question of 
ideal goods. The affinity and intimate 
connection with each other of the great 
problems of the human soul, practical no 
less than theoretical, stand out here in 
bold relief. 

In all our problems, we end — if we view 
the antithesis in its acutest form — with an 
interminable conflict into which the mental 
powers of man must ever plunge anew. But 
while we cannot solve definitively these great 
problems, still we can descry the road that 
leads onward and forward, so that the rights 
of both our thought and our life are safe- 
guarded. The insolubility of the problems 
really only means that, no matter how far 
we may penetrate in our research and 
thought, new horizons, new goals, and new 
tasks always rise before us. 



NOTES 

1. Page 4. Ch. Renouvier, Les dilemmcs de la meta- 
physique pure. Paris, 1901. P. 202. 

2. Page 5. These four problems include the triple 
division emanating from the Platonic school (according 
to Sextus Empiricus: Adv. mathematicos, VII, 16 by 
Xenokratos) into logic, physics {i.e. cosmology), and 
ethics, with the addition of the psychological problem, 
which has in modern times pressed forward to an inde- 
pendent point of departure. 

3. Page 9. Cf., in addition to the work by Renou- 
vier named in note I, Emile Boutroux' interesting works : 
De la contingence des lots de la nature, 2d ed., Paris, 1895, 
and De Videe de lot naturelle dans la science et la philoso- 
phic contemporaines. Paris, 1895. A kindred point of 
view is taken by Rudolph Eucken in Der Kampf um 
einen geistigen Lebensinhalt. Leipzig, 1896. 

4. Page I2„ Th. Lipps, Psychologie, Wissenschaft 
und Leben. Miinchen, 1891. As to Fries and Beneke 
see my History of Modern Philosophy, II, pp. 241, 259. 

5. Page 16. See my Psychology, V, A, 2. 

6. Page 19. Cf. my paper : La base psychologique des 
jugements {Revue philosophique, Oct.-Nov., 1 901), § 8 
and § 33. 

7. Page 21. For the point of view of modern posi- 
tivism regarding this problem in contrast to the point of 
view taken by Comte and Stuart Mill, interest attaches 

187 



183 Notes 

to Roberto Ardigo's essay: D unita delta coscienza. 
Padova, 1898. 

8. Page 22. Cf. my Psychology, I, 8 d. 

9. Page 23. Munsterberg, Psychology and Life. 
Boston, 1899. Munsterberg adheres to the view made 
current by Windelband and Rickert, according to which 
there is a chasm between natural sciences (in which 
psychology is ranked) and the cultural sciences. On 
this view see the excellent remarks by Wundt, Introduc- 
tion to Philosophy, Leipzig, 1901, pp. 65-74, and by Guido 
Villa, Psychology and History {The Monist, Jan., 1902). 

10. Page 24. Munsterberg, I.e. p. 282 : " If we force 
the system of science upon the real life, claiming that 
our life is really a psychophysical phenomenon, we are 
under the illusion of psychologism. If, on the other 
hand, we force the views of the real life, the personal 
categories, upon the scientific psychophysical phenomena, 
we are under the illusion of mysticism. The results on 
both are the same. We lose the truth of life and the 
truth of science." 

xi. Page 27. Descartes (Synopsis meditationum) 
teaches that all substances are unchangeable ; only body 
taken in general is substantial, not, e.g. the human 
body. Every soul, on the contrary, is pure substance, 
does not change, however much its single accidents 
(thoughts, feelings, and will-manifestations) may change. 
In his work Cogitata metaphysica (II, c. 11) Spinoza 
says (from the Cartesian point of view, which he essen- 
tially adopts in this work) : Si ad totam Naturam 
materiae attendamus, illi nihil novi accedit ; at respectu 
rerum particularium aliquo modo potest dici, illi aliquid 
novi accedere. Quod an etiam locum habet in rebus 
spiritualibus, non videtur: nam ilia \sc. spiritualia] ab 
invicem ita dependere non apparet [souls are not so 



Notes 189 

dependent on one another as bodies]. Later, Spinoza 
reached another conception. 

12. Page 27. Availing himself of an exposition of 
the 'active reason' of Aristotle, Averroes taught (see 
on this point Renan's Averroes et I'Averroisme. Paris, 
1852), that while the individual souls arise and pass 
away, the intellectus universalis remains, the world- 
thought, which operates in the thought of single souls. 
In the middle ages this doctrine was revived, among 
others, by Siger von Brabant in his Quaestiones de anima 
inteilectiva, recently edited by Mandonnet. (Mandon- 
net : Siger de Brabant et P Averro'isme latin au 13? siecle. 
Fribourg, 1899.) The whole doctrine of the conserva- 
tion of mind goes back to Neoplatonism (see Plotinus, 
Ennead, V, 9, 6). On Spinoza's doctrine of the infinite 
intellect and the idea of God, see History of Modern 
Philosophy, I, p. 312 ff. ; on Hegel, ibid. II, p. 174. 

13. Page 29. Maxwell, Scientific Papers, Cam- 
bridge, 1890. Vol. II, p. 759. A little above the ex- 
tract cited, Maxwell remarks that, while men to-day have 
generally given up the idea that the soul can be located 
anatomically somewhere in the brain, the idea has held 
sway longer, that if we could follow back the material 
processes far enough, we could arrive at a material process 
which was worked by the soul. Against this possibility 
the citation is directed. Cf. Spinoza, Ethics, III, 2, Schol. 
— Maxwell's conception of the law of inertia in his Mat- 
ter and Motion, § 41, leads to a similar result as his con- 
ception of the law of energy. Cf. my Psychology, II, 8. 

14. Page 30. Carl Lange, Nydelsernes Fysiologi. 
Kjobenhavn, 1899. P. 45. 

15. Page 32. Miinsterberg, Psychology and Life, 
p. 127 : " Mental facts, as they are not quantitative, can- 
not enter into any causal equation.'- 1 



190 Notes 

1 6. Page 34. Flechsig, Gehirn und Seek 2 : Leip- 
zig, 1896. P. 24 f. 

17. Page 35. Cf. the criticism of the theory of 
Flechsig by O. Vogt, Flechsigs Associationzentrenlehre, 
ihre Anhanger und Gegner, Zeitschrift fur Hypnotismus, 
V, 6 ; and Alb. Adamkiewicz, Die Grosshirnsrinde als 
Organ der Seele. Wiesbaden, 1902. P. 75 f. 

18. Page 37. M'unsterberg, Psychology and Life, 
p. 162: "The reality of the will and feeling and judg- 
ment do not belong to the describable world." — 'P. 208: 
"The subjective attitude is never object; it is never 
perceived." 

19. Page 42. History of Modern Philosophy, I, p. 
356 ff. 

20. Page 44. Cf. my Psychology, V, B. 6. 

21. Page 51. See the interesting discussion of Le 
parallelisme psychophysique et la Metaphysique positive, 
in the Bulletin de la societe francaise de Philosophic, 
Juin, 1 90 1. Bergson remarked during this discussion 
and elsewhere (p. 51) : "Etant donne un etat pyscholo- 
gique, la partie jouable de cet etat, celle qui se traduirait 
par une attitude du corps ou par des actions du corps, 
est representee dans le cerveau : le reste en est indepen- 
dant et n'a pas d'equivalent cerebral. De sorte qu'a un 
meme etat cerebral donne peuvent correspondre bien des 
etats psychologiques differents, mais non pas des etats 
quelconques. Ce sont des etats psychologiques qui ont 
tous en commun le meme schema moteur." 

22. Page 54. I have introduced an example of this 
in my Psychology, 3d German edition, p. 80, note. 

23. Page 55. Cf. my Psychology, VII, B, 4. — liber 
Wiederkennen ( Vierteljahrsschr. fur wissenschaftl. Phi- 
losophic, XIV, pp. 293-316). — S'oren Kierkegaard som 
Filosof, pp. 74-81. — Ebbinghaus, Grundzuge der Psy- 



Notes 191 

chologie, I, p. 1 68 (cf. also his article in the Zeitschrift 
fur Psychologic, XI, p. 201), and Ehrenfels, Werttheorie, 
I, pp. 245-249, argue from the imperceptibility of the 
will, that the will is no particular psychical element. 
Cf. my criticism of the last work, in the Gottinger gel. 
Anzeigen, 1900, p. 742 f. 

24. Page 57. See fuller treatment of this point in 
my Psychology, II; IV, 7 e ; V, B, 5 ; VII, A, I ; B, 4-5. 

25. Page 59. Ostwald attempts in his Naturphilo- 
sophie (Leipzig, 1902) to show that the concept of energy 
is the fundamental concept of natural science, and since 
manifestations of consciousness are also (after Kant) to 
be conceived as activities, energy also becomes the fun- 
damental psychological concept. On the relation of the 
two kinds of energy to one another he does not express 
himself clearly. In one place the processes of conscious- 
ness themselves are called 'energetic' (p. 394), at an- 
other he says that consciousness is conditioned by the 
energy of the nervous system (p. 396), and again men- 
tal energy is defined as ' conscious or unconscious nerve 
energy' (p. 398). 

26. Page 61. On the different kinds of recognition 
see my paper Uber Wiederkennen ( Vierteljahrsschr. f. 
wiss. Phil. XIV, p. 38 f.). 

27. Page 62. See La base psychologique du jugement 
{Revue philos., Oct.-Nov., 1901), § 20. 

28. Page 65. See ibid. chap. VI. 

29. Page 69. Hobbes, Logic, chap. 3, §§ 8-9 ; 
Physics, chap. 25, § I. (Nevertheless Hobbes teaches 
in another place that it is analysis of the given data that 
leads us to principles : Analytica est ars ratiocinandi a 
supposito ad principia, id est ad propositiones primas vel 
ex primis demonstrandam. De rationibus motuum et 
magnitudinum, chap. 20, § 6.) — Fichte, Grundlage d. 



192 Notes 

gesamten Wissensckaftslehre, § I. — S. Kierkegaard, 
Uvidenskabelig Efterskrift, p. 83. See my work : Soren 
Kierkegaard ah Philosoph. (Frommann's Klassiker der 
Philosophie), 2d ed., p. 67. — Kroman, Vor Naturerkjen- 
delse, p. 270 ff. 

30. Page 71. Ernst Mach, Beitrage zur Analyse der 
Empfindungen, p. 144. 

31. Page 71. Maxwell, Scientific Papers, II, p. 360. 
— H. Hertz, Einleitung (Werke, III, p. I f.). — Cf. an 
interesting discussion De la valeur des lois physiques, in 
the Bulletin de la societe francaise de philosophie, Mai, 
1 901. 

32. Page 80. Kritik der reinen Vernunft, p. 653. 

33. Page Ss- History of Modern Philosophy, II, 
pp. 125 f., 245-6. 

34. Page 84. The expression 'static concept of 
truth ' was used — with a somewhat different motive — 
by Louis Weber in the philosophical congress at Paris 
in 1900. 

35. Page 86. History of Modern Philosophy, I, 
pp. 177 f. 

36. Page 89. See note 31. 

37. Page 91. H. Hertz, Uber die Beziehungen 
zwischen Licht und Elektrizitat, 1889, p. 29. — Boltz- 
mann's Address before the meeting of German scientists, 
1900 (translated in The Monist, Jan. 1901 : The recent 
development of method in theoretical physics), and his 
paper in the Ubersichten der Wiener Akademie, chap. 
V, 8 (translated in The Monist, Oct. 1901 : On the 
necessity of atomic theories in physics). — Cf. on this 
whole question also C. Christiansen, Den elektromagne- 
tiske Lysteori (Det danske Vid. Selskis Oversigter, 1889), 
and the same author in Fysisk Tidsskrift, I, pp. 4-5. 

38. Page 92. Maxwell, Scientific Papers, II, pp. 26- 



Notes 193 

33, 302-305 (where he shows for what he is indebted to 
Faraday and Lord Kelvin), 326, 777 f. 

3g. Page 93. Cf. Uber Wiederkennen ( Vierteljahrs- 
sckr. f. wiss. Phil. XIV). 

40. Page 93. On this point we cannot grant the 
case to Ostwald when he tries to trace back everything 
in Nature to ' energy.' Mass as well as space, weight, 
and chemical properties are to be derived from the con- 
cept of energy. It is quite correct that all these concepts 
presuppose the concept of energy ; but is it the only fun- 
damental concept in natural philosophy ? Then one 
ought also to be able to derive ' geometrical ' properties 
from dynamic ; but Ostwald does not attempt this. In 
his volume on Die Uberwindung des wissenschaftlichen 
Materialismus (1895) he defines matter as "a spatially 
{sic) ordered group of different energies" (p. 28). This 
spatial order, which is here recognized as of special 
moment, he seems to me to push a little to one side in his 
Naturphilosophie (1902), in which the ' energetic world 
idea ' is developed. The chief doctrine on which he 
builds his system is, however, as follows : " Every process 
without exception can be exactly and exhaustively 
expounded and described, by declaring which energies 
experience temporal and spatial {sic) changes" (p. 152). 
That the concepts of energy and of time cannot be 
separated from one another is self-evident, because 
energy means the capacity to overcome opposition, and 
all overcoming lays claim to time. The connection 
of the concept of energy with spatial changes is not 
so self-evident. This connection is derived by Ostwald 
simply because he has taken the concept of energy 
from spatial phenomena by investigations as to the 
changes in definite parts of space. Only the fact that 
he leaves this geometrical element heedlessly in his 
o 



194 Notes 

concept of energy makes it possible for him to believe 
that this concept is to be accepted at face value as the 
same for psychical phenomena as for physical, so that 
the problem of 'souls and bodies' would be solved 
by setting up the concept of energy. See above, 
note 25. 

41. Page 96. Hume, Treatise on Human Nature, 
1, 3,6: " Your appeal to past experience decides nothing 
in the present case, and at the utmost can only prove, 
that that very object, which produc'd any other, was 
at that very instant endow'd with such a power." 

42. Page 97. Critique of Pure Reason, p. 181 : 
"By this basal doctrine [the doctrine of causality and 
the related principle of the conservation of ' substance ' 
and of the reciprocal action of everything that exists] we 
shall be justified in putting together phenomena only 
according to the analogy of the logical and general unity 
of concepts" — P. 180: "An analogy of experience will 
thus only be a rule, according to which unity of experi- 
ence shall come out of perceptions, and as the principle 
of events (phenomena) be valid not constitutively but 
merely regulatively." 

43. Page 98. F. H. Bradley, Appearance and 
Reality, London, 1893, chap. 4-7, 18. — Bernard Bosan- 
quet, Logic, or the Morphology of Knowledge, Oxford, 
1888, Book I, chap. 6. 

44. Page 100. Rich. Avenarius, Kritik der reinen 
Erfahrung, II, pp. 332-339. — Ernst Mach, Zur Analyse 
der Empfindungen, p. 168: "The fact of the irreversibil- 
ity of time reduces itself to the fact that the changes 
of value of physical magnitudes take place in a definite 
direction. Of the two analytical possibilities only one is 
real. We need not see in this a metaphysical problem." 
Cf. on these theories Heinrich Gr'unbaum, Zur Kritik 



Notes 195 

der modernen Kausalanschauungen {Archiv fur sysle- 
matische Philosophic, 1899, pp. 392-409). 

45. Page 102. Bosanquet also concedes this : " At 
any given moment we have no choice but to say, that the 
future is conditioned by the past, . . . effect by cause." 
Logic, I, p. 272. 

46. Page 104. La base psychologique du jugement, 

§27. 

47. Page 106. Jevons, Principles of Science, 2d ed., 
London, 1877, p. 43. (De Morgan had already pointed 
out, as Jevons remarks, that we customarily think and 
argue within a limited world or sphere of ideas, even 
though this is not expressly declared.) 

48. Page 107. Francis Bradley has clearly discerned 
the opposition between time and 'the Absolute,' when 
he declares : " If time is not unreal, I admit that our 
Absolute is a delusion " {Appearance and Reality, p. 206). 
"The Absolute has no seasons" {ibid. p. 500). — The 
criticism of a speculative theory and the reaction against 
it consequently often utilizes the reality of time as a 
main argument. Cf. C. H. Weisse's and S. Kierkegaard's 
relation to Hegel. {History of Modern Philosophy, IT, 
pp. 267, 286-7.) I n a brilliant volume, Tidsexistensens 
Apologi Et sty eke relationsteorie (Upsala, 1888), Pontus 
Wilner has attempted to shatter the ' Either — Or ' here ex- 
hibited. He tries to show that the highest completeness 
can only be reached by the successive unfolding of quali- 
ties which would mutually exclude one another if simul- 
taneous. But the question of the limitation which inheres 
in the very succession is thus not raised ! 

49. Page in. See my paper: Die Kontinuitdt im 
philosophise/ten Entivicklungsgange Kants {Archiv fur 
Geschichte der Philosophic, VII). 

50. Page 113. Cf. La base psychologique du juge- 



196 Notes 

ment, §§ 24 and 27, and, with reference to religious 
conclusions, my Religionspkilosophie, pp. 64-68. 

51. Page 114. See my paper: Philosophy and Life 
{International Journal of Ethics, XII, p. 146). — On 
the imaginary in the epistemological sense, see Wundt, 
System der Philosophie, pp. 195-199. 

52. Page 119. Cf. on this point my Religionsphiloso- 
phie, pp. 54-63. — In the epistemological section of the 
Religionsphilosophie I have already expounded my con- 
ception of the problem of Being and its treatment. 

53. Page 124. Goethe, Farbenlehre, pp. 124, 175— 
177. Cf. Conversations with Eckermann, 18 Feb. 1829, 
21 Dec. 1831. — Goethe applied this idea not only in the 
realm of the theory of colors, but also to magnetism and 
botany. See Spruche in Prosa (On Natural Science) and 
Conversations with Eckermann, 27 Jan. 1830. — From 
his Nachtr'dgen zur Farbenlehre it is evident that Hegel 
took up with avidity the idea of type-phenomenon as 
Goethe had expounded it. 

54. Page 129. See my paper: Philosophie als Kunst 
{Ethische Kultur, 1894). On Schopenhauer and Lange, 
see History of Modern Philosophy, II, pp. 233 f., 547 f. 

55. Page 142. See History of Modern Philosophy, 
II, p. 180 f. It is characteristic of the English thinkers 
who have most recently dealt with some of Hegel's fun- 
damental ideas, to concede that the argument here is 
much more of an analogy than a proof. Francis Bradley 
never considers the analogy as permissible ; according 
to him, the highest reality cannot be called either soul 
or body, although the soul more than the body possesses 
that combination of extent and unity, that ' self-consist- 
ency' which is the mark of true reality {Appearance 
and Reality, pp. 307, 359). — In his article on Hegel's 
treatment of the categories of the idea {Mind, 1900, 



Notes 197 

p. 149 f.) McTaggart concedes that we only have a sin- 
gle example of the category ' Geist,' which according to 
Hegel possesses theological or cosmological significance. 
— If a distinction is made (as by A. E. Taylor in Mind, 
1900, p. 245) between two idealistic schools, the one 
standing near Leibniz and Lotze, and the other holding 
by Hegel, then I must emphasize the fact that it is the 
first of these two schools that has most clearly discerned 
the real philosophical basis of metaphysical idealism. 
(Taylor himself even acknowledges that in both schools 
an analogy with the mind of man is fundamental when 
he says that both are agreed in " the main principle that 
it is in mind, and nowhere else, that we are face to face 
with the central reality of the universe," ibid.) 

56. Page 145. Compare on this type my ReZigions- 
phiZosopJiie, pp. 47 f., 1 18 f., 277 f. 

57. Page 155. In my Ethik (2d ed., p. 27 f.) I went 
no deeper into the relation of the notions of worth, of 
purpose, and of the norm. But see, on the other hand, 
La base psychologique du jugement, § 27 (cf. § 37), and 
my ReligionsphiZosophie, p. 10 f. 

58. Page 163. Cf. my Ethik, 2d ed., p. 164 f. 

59. Page 167. Cf. my PsychoZogy,VI,B, 1-5 Ethik' 1 , 
XIII, 4. 

60. Page 169. Francis Bradley, Appearance and 
ReaZity, pp. 414-418. — A. E. Taylor, The ProbZem of 
Conduct, London, 1901, p. 201. 

61. Page 172. Cf. my Ethik 2 , p. 69 f. 

62. Page 176. In my ReZigionsphiZosophie, for the 
sake of a more comprehensive illumination of the prob- 
lem, I introduce beside the psychological-historical in- 
quiry also an epistemological and an ethical inquiry. In 
this shorter exposition I dwell especially on the psy- 
chological-historical inquiry, pointing out only casually 



198 Notes 

and very briefly the epistemological and ethical points 
of view. 

63. Page 182. Plato, Phaidros, S. 249 C. (jrpbs ohirep 
6e6s &v 0ei6s £<ttl). Literally rendered, " that, to live 
in which is the divinity of God." 



INDEX 



Altruism, 170. 

Analogy, its place in philo- 
sophical theory, 121 f. 

Antinomy, of parts and whole 
in consciousness, 19-22, 
40; in knowledge of Be- 
ing, 119; in Ethics, 162 f., 
170. 

Aristippas, 161. 

Aristotle, 160. 

Art, psychology as an, 23; 
metaphysics as an, 127. 

Association-psychology, 18, 

34 f- 
Atomism, psychic, 18. 
Avenarius, 31, 38, 71, 73, 

99- 

Being, the problem of, Chap- 
ter III ; possiblyunfinished, 
120, 136 f. ; intelligible, 
131; contains a unifying 
principle, 131 ; its essence, 
139; may be an unfolding 
story, 150. 

Bergson, 51. 

boltzmann, 91. 

bosanquet.98. 

Bradley, 98. 

Brain, and mind, 37-59. 



Causality, 64 ; elementary 
and ideal, 66, 78, 94; and 
time, 97 ; and identity, 30, 
95 f., 103; and under- 
standing, 132. 

Cause, and reason, 95, 98. 

Change, direction of, 104, 
146; of values, 167. 

Conflict of values, 169 ; of our 
thought with reality, 186. 

Consciousness, the problem 
of, Chapter I ; as a contin- 
uum or as a sum, 14; 
its ' irrationality,' 20. 

Continuity, 8 f . ; in conscious- 
ness, 16, 40 f. ; and iden- 
tity, 30, 46 f. ; in brain 
action, 49; in knowledge, 
60 f. ; in ethics, 162 f. ; in 
religion, 178, 186; and dis- 
continuity, 67 ; and under- 
standing, 75, 109, 117; and 
reality, 140 f. 

Cosmology, 127. 

Degree, differences of, 85. 
Development, see ' Evolution . ' 
Differences, of kind and de- 
gree, 86 ; of duty, 171 ff. 
Direction, of change, 104, 146. 



199 



200 



Index 



Discontinuity, in general, 8 f. ; 

in mental life, 26, 33, 37, 39 ; 

in qualities, 85; in Being, 

136 f. 
Duties, their relativity, 171 f. 
Dynamic, vs. static view of 

world, 93 ; concept of truth, 

82. 

Economic theory of science, 
71, 80. 

Empiricism, vi, 70. 

Energy, 88 ; potential psychi- 
cal, 44, 142 ; neural, 58. 

Epiphenomenalism, 45. 

Ethics, xii, 151 ; problem of, 
158 f. ; Greek, 162 ; the au- 
thor's, 169. 

Evolution, 66, 145 f.; inde- 
pendent of causal concept, 
147 ; universal, 150. 

Extension, 91 f. 

Faith, religious, 179. 
Final causes, 20, 43. 
Flechsig, 34 f. 

Galileo, 86. 
Gods, 178, 182. 
Good, see ' Value.' 

Hegel, 142. 
Hertz, 71, 91. 
Hobbes, 140. 
Hume, 56, 96. 
Hypotheses, 79. 

Idealism, 140 f. 
Ideals, see ' Value.' 
Identity, 46 f. ; and causality, 
30, 95 f., 103. 



Individuality, in Ethics, 171. 

Irrational, the, in psychology, 
19-21 ; in knowledge, 67, 
84 f. ; in Being, 120, 135, 143, 
149 ; in Ethics, 173. 

Justice, 169. 

Kant, 75, 80, 83, 96, no, 155, 
163. 

Kierkegaard, 161. 

Knowledge, the problem of, 
Chapter II ; the four the- 
ories of, 71 f. ; is it subjec- 
tive or objective ? 74, 80, 107, 
110-115; a part of Being, 114. 

Lange, A., 128. 
Lange, K., 30. 
Leibnitz, 40, 42, 121. 

Mach, 71, 99. 
Materialism, 139. 
Matter, 92. 
Maxwell, 71, 91. 
Mechanical philosophy, 87. 
Mill, 70. 

Mind, see ' Consciousness.' 
Mind and brain, 37-59. 
Monism, 132; critical, viii, 
x, 136, 144. 

MiJNSTERBERG, 23, 37. 

Nietzsche, 170. 

Objectivity, see ' Knowledge.' 
Ostwald, 59. 

Parallelism of brain and 

mind, 51 f. 
Personality, 4, 20, 109, 158, 163. 



Index 



201 



Philosophy, professors of, vi. 
Physiology and psychology, 

Pluralism, 133. See ' Dis- 
continuities.' 

Possibility, 44. 

Potential energy, 44. 

Psychology and philosophy, 
I2 > 37. 59 ; an d physiology, 
31 f. ; and epistemology, 
100; and logic, 77 f. 

Psychophysical relation, 37- 

59- 
Purpose, 20, 43. 

Quality vs. quantity, 87 f. 

Rationalism, vi. 

Rationality, see ' Continuity ' ; 
see ' Irrational, the.' 

Reality, tests of, 118; and 
ideal goods, 184. 

Reason, 80 f. ; and cause, 95, 
98 f. 

Recollection, 65. 

Relativity, of knowledge, of 
duties, 171. 

Religion, xii; its problem, 
173 ; its development, 174 ; 
its essence, 175, 179; de- 
fined, 176 ; its permanence, 
180 ; differences in, 181 ; 
their estimation, 185. 

Rhythmic recurrence, 149. 

Schiller, 76, 114, 162. 
Schopenhauer, 128. 
Self-assertion vs. altruism, 

170. 
Socrates, 166. 



Soul, 34. 
Spencer, 70. 

Static view of world, 92 f., 145. 
Subconscious facts, 39 f. 
Subjectivity of knowledge, 74, 
80, 107, no. 

Thing-in-itself, no, 126. 

Time, and causality, 97 ; and 
reality, ix, 98-106; and ir- 
rationality, 136. 

Tolstoy, 169. 

Totality, see ' Whole.' 

Truth, 67, 81; dynamic and 
static concepts of, ix f., 82, 
84, 90. 

' Type-phenomenon,' 124. 

Understanding, 67, 74 f., 108, 

132. 
Unifying principle in Being, 

131. 138. 

Value, the problem of, Chap- 
ter IV ; defined, 154 f. ; 
relativity of, 155 ; standards 
of, 155-165 ; educational 
and historical changes in, 
166 f. ; conservation of, 
177 f. 

Whole, 119; and parts, x, xii, 

123, 133 f. ; in ethics, 160, 

168-171. 
Will, 55 f. 
Work, ethical, 158. 
Working value of hypotheses, 

x, 81. 
World is still unfinished, 

xiii, 136, 185. 



OCT 24 1905 



